Digital Health’s 2025 Review: Top 10 most read opinion pieces

The government’s NHS 10 year health plan was a key theme in several of Digital Health’s most-read columns in 2025.

Writers’ interests ranged widely, however, from the importance of human connection in a digital NHS to the thrilling prospect of mining ‘gold’ from data.

Read on to discover the topics and writers which made our top 10 opinion pieces of the year.

10.The importance of human touch in Wes Streeting’s digital NHS

The NHS 10 year health plan’s shift from analogue to digital inspired this reflection in July on the continued importance of human connection.

Dr Karen Marshall, a nurse consultant specialising in respiratory medicine at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, considered the role of human support in digital cognitive behavioural therapy.

“The evidence is clear: while digital content can be effective, outcomes are better when people feel supported by someone who is really paying attention,” she wrote.

9.Embedding PHM at the heart of the Model ICB

NHS England’s Model ICB Blueprint marked a pivotal moment for integrate care boards (ICBs), setting a “clear direction for them to become intelligent commissioners” wrote Sam Williamson, associate medical director at Hertfordshire and West Essex ICB.

But the task ahead, he insisted, “is not structural, it’s practical”. To turn functions into reality will mean “being systematic in taking data-driven, evidence based, and clinically informed decisions across all levels”.

In this opinion piece published in June, Williamson set out how his ICB used population health management (PHM) to transform care for people with frailty. The PHM approach should now inform the federated data platform’s capabilities, he argued.

8.Desperate shortage of clinical coders creates financial uncertainty

This opinion piece warning of the dire consequences of a national shortage of qualified clinical coders became one of best read columns of 2025, despite being published at the tail end of 2024, on 19 December. The topic clearly struck a chord that resonated into the new year.

Dr Marc Farr, chair of the Chief Data and Analytical Officer Network, highlighted the NHS’s reliance on clinical coders: “Accurate and timely clinical coding is vital to ensure both clinical information and funding flows around the NHS correctly.

“But right now there is a desperate shortage of clinical coders… leading to financial uncertainty across the NHS [and] potentially limiting resources for patient care.”

7.We need to act fast to close the NHS AI safety gap

Current safety standards can’t keep up with AI, warned Yvette Khozam, electronic prescribing and medicines administration lead pharmacist at West London NHS Trust, in this powerful opinion piece in August.

Khozam pointed out that despite the 10 year health plan’s ambitions “we’re deploying AI under safety standards last substantially updated in 2018, built on a 2013 framework – well before generative models, adaptive algorithms, or real-world deception were in scope”.

She called for immediate action to disclose internal connections and make data passed between systems traceable through audit logs, test for hidden behaviour, and monitor for semantic drift.

“AI tools don’t always stay consistent. Over time, they may phrase outputs differently, omit key details or shift how they summarise similar input,” Khozam wrote.

6.Why technology is key to cutting elective waiting lists

In January, Vin Diwakar, national director of transformation at NHSE, explained how technology would cut waiting lists and reform elective care.

“We want to make the NHS App the digital front door for the health service, so that patients can manage their healthcare from the palm of their hands – and to create a single patient record, owned by the individual, so that healthcare staff have a full picture of a patient wherever they go in the NHS.”

Diwakar also highlighted a key role for the federated data platform in improving NHS efficiency: “The IT platform will help ensure operating theatres aren’t left empty when they could be providing life-changing treatment – and that integrated care boards have the insights needed to tailor early preventative services for their communities.”

5.How to turn NHS data into gold

The NHS holds vast stores of data it cannot use or sell, but there is a way to “sidestep” the barriers and release its clinical and commercial value without betraying patients’ trust, argued Martin Farrier, director of digital medicine and chief clinical information officer at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL), and David Chapman, chief data analytics officer at WWL.

“The sidestep is synthesised data. If we use our data to create a synthetic copy, it is no longer identifiable because none of the patients in the data set are real… Synthetic data could be safely shared or even sold. It’s not patients’ data, but a reliable, accurate replica,” they wrote.

In this thought-provoking piece in August, the authors revealed that they have started on the synthetic data journey at their trust.

4.The 10 year health plan places big bets on digital

On 4 July, a day after the 10 year health plan’s publication, Jon Hoeksma welcomed the plan’s ambitions for digital but highlighted, unsparingly, its flaws and omissions.

“On almost every page digital and technology features heavily, indeed it is the leitmotif of a document that is extremely long on aspiration but worryingly light on delivery plans,” wrote the founder of Digital Health and chief executive of health IT market and research business Future Health Intelligence.

“There is almost an embarrassment of riches for digital health professionals or those interested in how digital, and data, can help them do their job better.

“And yet there is also a complete abstraction from the current messy reality of today’s brownfield NHS tech landscape,” Hoeksma wrote.

3.Morley: ‘We need greater regulation of ambient voice technologies’

Ahead of her appearance at Digital Health Summer Schools 2025, self-confessed “100% health nerd” Dr Jessica Morley explained why the danger from ambient voice technologies is greater than it seems.

“People think that all they’re doing is listening, but they’re not – they interpreting and inferring… There are cases where these things are inventing that someone had a test they are supposed to have – and then it never happens.

“You start having knock-on effects such as misdiagnosis or late diagnosis,” she wrote.

Morley, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University Digital Ethics Center and a former tech adviser to the UK government, also took aim at the “hyper-personalisation” of AI in the NHS.

Using AI to “empower” individuals often became “victim blaming”, she argued.

2.Joe McDonald: The single patient record is too big to succeed

Never one to hold back, Joe McDonald drew on his long experience of tech initiatives to predict the failure of the single patient record (SPR).

The peripatetic medical director for a number of SME health tech companies and founder of the Great North Care Record, revealed that talk about the SPR was making him “nervous”.

“I was the medical director of the Lorenzo delivery team, during the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

“The proposed electronic patient record (EPR) was a single patient record project for all the citizens of the North Midlands and East of England: 30 million citizens, so not quite as ambitious as the SPR. Nonethless, a massively ambitious project. That notoriously failed. It was just too big.

“There is a Goldilocks principle at work in IT projects, where something has to be just the ‘right’ size to succeed,” he wrote.

1.Time to rethink how we evaluate digital technologies in healthcare

“If we are serious about digital transformation – not just automation – we need to rethink how we evaluate impact,’ wrote Kathrin Cresswell, professor of digital innovations in health and care at the University of Edinburgh, in the most read opinion piece of the year.

Published in May, the topic clearly resonated with NHS digital leaders who want to know they are making a difference.

Creswell argued that productivity should be viewed “not as a benefit [of technology] but as a short-term outcome that may lead to a benefit further down the line”.

Unanticipated outcomes and benefits should be tracked over time and viewed in context, she said.