What Should Digital Healthcare Make Easier for Patients?
*Updated 23 September 2026*
Healthcare has moved well beyond the question of whether digital technology should play a role in patient care.
By April 2026, 41 million people were registered with the NHS App, every acute NHS trust in England was connected to it and around 64% of hospital appointments could already be viewed through the app.
The Government's 10 Year Health Plan for England places the shift from analogue to digital alongside moving care from hospital to community and from sickness to prevention. Its ambition is for digital services to give patients greater control while reducing unnecessary administrative work for NHS employees.
The challenge for healthcare leaders is therefore no longer simply digitising services.
It is making sure digital transformation actually makes healthcare easier.
A patient should find it easier to book or manage an appointment, understand an update, reach the correct service and receive support in an accessible format.
A healthcare professional should spend less time navigating systems, repeating administration or searching for information and more time supporting patients.
That is the standard against which digital healthcare investment should now be measured.
Britannic's wider Healthcare technology and communications proposition focuses on this combination of patient experience, communications, automation, data and resilient infrastructure.
How Can Digital Healthcare Make Access To Care Simpler?
Digital access should remove unnecessary steps between a patient recognising that they need help and reaching the appropriate service.
The NHS App demonstrates how quickly this model is developing. Patients can increasingly manage referrals, hospital appointments, prescriptions, records and healthcare communications from one place. In March 2026 alone, more than 15 million people logged into the app.
The opportunity extends beyond providing an app.
Healthcare organisations should consider the entire communication journey around an appointment.
Can patients easily make contact?
Can appointments be confirmed or changed?
Are reminders arriving through channels patients recognise?
Can straightforward enquiries be resolved without joining a telephone queue?
What happens when someone needs additional support?
This matters because avoidable communication creates significant pressure. NHS England reported in March 2026 that 16 million GP appointments were missed during 2025, equivalent to 4.3% of appointments.
Digital appointment management and messaging can help, but healthcare providers should avoid treating every patient journey as digital-only.
Some people will want self-service. Others will need telephone support, particularly when their situation is urgent, sensitive or complex.
The objective should therefore be digital choice alongside accessible human support.
Where Can Digital Self-Service Reduce Unnecessary Demand?
One of the clearest opportunities for digital healthcare is removing interactions that patients do not actually want to make.
Prescription enquiries provide a useful example.
NHS England estimated that 45% of calls to community pharmacies were from people asking whether their prescription was ready. A prescription-tracking feature was consequently introduced through the NHS App. Within its first ten weeks, nearly 400,000 people had used it.
That is a useful model for digital transformation.
The technology did not simply replace a telephone call with another communication channel. It addressed the reason the patient needed to call in the first place.
Healthcare organisations can apply the same thinking elsewhere.
Routine appointment updates, referral progress, service information and straightforward administrative questions may be suitable for self-service or automation.
Britannic's contact centre solutions and conversational technologies can support this type of interaction while ensuring more complicated conversations still reach employees.
The first question should therefore not be:
What can be automated?
It should be:
Why does the patient need to contact the organisation at all?
Removing unnecessary demand can improve patient experience while releasing capacity for interactions where human support adds much greater value.
How Can Technology Give Healthcare Professionals More Time For Patients?
Digital healthcare should improve the employee experience as well as the patient experience.
The NHS has already established much of the technical foundation. By March 2025, 91% of NHS trusts had implemented an electronic patient record, 99.9% of general practice used digital telephony and more than 98% were using online consultation, appointment-booking and messaging systems.
The next challenge is making those systems work more effectively together.
Healthcare professionals still spend considerable time documenting conversations, organising information, handling repetitive enquiries and moving between systems.
AI and automation can increasingly support this work.
NHS England announced in July 2026 that AI tools including AI-assisted clinical notetaking and AI triage through the NHS App would be accelerated as part of a wider £10 billion investment in NHS technology, digital and data systems over three years.
Britannic has explored this more specifically in What Healthcare Leaders Should Do Next, including how AI can support clinical documentation and wider collaborative processes such as multidisciplinary meetings.
The principle should remain consistent.
AI should reduce administrative burden, organise information and support healthcare professionals.
It should not introduce another disconnected system that creates additional work.
How Can Healthcare Providers Keep Digital Services Inclusive?
Digital convenience and digital accessibility are not the same thing.
A healthcare service can be technically available online while remaining difficult to use for somebody with limited digital confidence, a disability, unreliable connectivity or a language barrier.
The Government's 10 Year Health Plan recognises that digital access should help free physical services for people with more complex requirements rather than eliminating non-digital access altogether.
Healthcare providers should therefore design around different patient circumstances, rather than assuming one preferred channel.
Language is one example.
Britannic's NetTranslate real-time translation can provide AI-powered translation across telephone calls, Microsoft Teams and chat in more than 100 languages.
That can provide another route for healthcare organisations handling routine patient interactions where language might otherwise become a barrier.
Human interpreters will remain appropriate for complex clinical, safeguarding or particularly sensitive conversations. The point is not to replace specialist interpretation.
It is to give healthcare teams more options for making everyday communication understandable.
Accessibility should ultimately be considered across language, channel, device, digital confidence and the complexity of the patient's circumstances.
How Important Is Communication Resilience In Digital Healthcare?
The more healthcare relies on digital systems, the more important resilience becomes.
The original article uses the July 2024 Microsoft outage as the main warning about digital dependency. That example is now dated and should be replaced with a more useful question:
What happens to patient communication when a system, carrier, site or network becomes unavailable?
Telephony remains particularly important.
Patients may use digital services for routine interactions but still rely on telephone communication for urgent enquiries, appointment changes, clinical advice and access to services.
Britannic's work with a major UK NHS Trust demonstrates why communications infrastructure has to be treated as part of healthcare continuity.
The Trust was operating legacy telephony across multiple hospitals, including infrastructure dependent on ISDN. Britannic introduced NetX, cloud-based IVR capabilities and business-continuity measures to strengthen routing and maintain critical communications during disruption.
Read how Britannic transformed the NHS Trust's telephony
This is an important part of digital healthcare that can easily be overlooked.
Patient-facing innovation is valuable, but it still depends on reliable networks, communications and operational continuity underneath it.
Britannic's Unified Communications proposition and NetX capabilities support this wider communications layer. NetX provides routing, resilience and business-continuity capabilities for organisations that need greater control over enterprise voice.
What Role Should AI Play In The Future Of Patient Access?
AI is becoming much more closely integrated with healthcare delivery.
NHS England's July 2026 programme includes an AI triage capability designed to help patients identify the most appropriate service through the NHS App. The initial expansion is expected to reach more than 200,000 patients within 12 months, with wider availability planned by April 2028.
This represents a significant step beyond the generic chatbot model.
AI can potentially help healthcare organisations:
- Understand patient intent
- Direct patients towards appropriate services
- Summarise interactions
- Reduce repetitive administration
- Analyse recurring reasons for contact
- Support employees during interactions
- Identify opportunities to improve services
Britannic's AI Engine can analyse unstructured information including conversations, emails and other interaction data to identify themes and sentiment.
However, healthcare organisations need clear boundaries around where AI assists and where clinical or professional judgement remains essential.
The strongest use of AI is not necessarily replacing another interaction.
It may be helping the organisation understand why patients are contacting it repeatedly and what could be improved upstream.
What Should Healthcare Leaders Review Before Introducing More Technology?
Rather than starting with another platform, Britannic would recommend reviewing five aspects of the patient journey.
- Access - Can patients reach the right service without navigating unnecessary numbers, departments, systems or digital forms
- Effort - Which interactions require patients or healthcare professionals to repeat information, chase updates or complete avoidable administration?
- Inclusion - Can people with different languages, accessibility requirements and levels of digital confidence use the service effectively?
- Continuity - What happens to critical patient communications if a system, network or site becomes unavailable?
- Insight - Is interaction data being used to identify why patients make contact, where journeys break down and which processes should change?
This creates a more useful digital-healthcare assessment than simply listing which technologies an organisation has deployed.
A healthcare provider could have an EPR, an app, digital telephony, AI and a modern contact centre and still provide a frustrating experience if those technologies do not support the same patient journey.
Digital Healthcare Should Remove Friction From Care
Healthcare has already crossed the threshold into digital delivery.
The next phase is about making it work better.
The NHS App is expanding.
AI is entering patient triage and clinical administration.
Electronic patient records are widespread.
Digital telephony and online consultations are already established across primary care.
Adding more technology is therefore not automatically transformation.
Digital healthcare should make it easier for patients to access, understand and manage their care, while helping healthcare professionals spend less time on administrative friction.
Britannic Technologies supports healthcare organisations across communications, contact centres, AI, automation, NetTranslate, connectivity, NetX and managed services, with an approach focused on integrating technology around operational and patient outcomes rather than implementing isolated systems.
For another perspective on what digital healthcare feels like from the patient's side, the related How Digital Healthcare Became My Go-To Lifeline article provides a first-person account of how remote consultations, digital referrals and online healthcare services can reduce friction in everyday care.
Healthcare organisations reviewing their digital strategy can speak to Britannic about where patient journeys are creating unnecessary effort, where employees are losing time and how existing communications and technology could be integrated or optimised before additional platforms are introduced.
