The UK Data Bill - what it means for healthcare and the NHS 10 Year Plan

In her second blog on the Government’s 10 Year NHS Health Plan, Hema Purohit, Founder of Lotus Advisory and Consulting Ltd, discusses how integral the UK Data Bill is to the proposals. She outlines some of the implications for managing and accessing patient data both in the community healthcare hubs and for healthcare research.

The power of patient data

The recent Data (Use and Access) Bill (2025) will, it claims, “unlock the secure and effective use of data for the public interest”. While much of the public debate is focused on artificial intelligence (AI), copyright and digital ID, the Bill has important implications for health and care data. This will be particularly relevant for the new community healthcare hubs, proposed as part of the 10 Year Plan.

The Bill supports plans to create a single patient record and make it accessible through the NHS App. It gives new powers to set information standards that health and care services – and more importantly, their IT suppliers – will have to follow. The information standards will define how data is collected, shared, and managed, which means having the right technology solutions in place to adopt and work to these standards.

Ensuring a secure, connected healthcare service

With the many services available at this central hub, and the technology that comes with it, the integrated patient record is going to be key in making sure that the different departments, systems and services are talking to each other.

A patient who goes in for physiotherapy will want their GP and records to be automatically updated. This can be a challenge because typically in hospitals today different departments don't talk to each other very well. It requires a new way of thinking and working.

There is also the issue of ensuring that care providers are only accessing the data that is relevant to their patient and that treatment. This is where managing security in accessing patient data is vital, for patient privacy and safety, and compliance with healthcare data protection regulations.

Of course, staff may move around the building as they go about their daily work. Ideally, if a nurse, for example, moves from one department to another, they should be able to pick up any device and log in easily, identified by their profile and single sign 0n (SSO), advocated by the 10 Year plan as an essential requirement.

This may need to be adjusted according to the task that they are carrying out. The nurse may be carrying out vaccinations in the morning and need just to update records with a restricted view, but in the afternoon performing a minor procedure which requires access to a patient’s full record. There are already technologies available, like those from Imprivata, which can facilitate this secure, managed role-based access.

Supporting innovation and research

The Bill also outlines how important it is to put privacy, security, and trust at the heart of decisions about how patient data is used. This is especially vital as new services like the Health Data Research Service are developed (the National data library). This will ultimately provide access to anonymised patient data from the Single Patient Record, including GP data, for research.

These healthcare data sets are coming initially from primary care, but due to be expanded over the next couple of years. The theory is that data can be used once for research purposes and will not be duplicated in different systems.

Though the Data Bill only applies to the United Kingdom, it may also have knock-on effects for data sharing and transfers with European countries. The continued free flow of data between the UK and EU is key to medical research and innovation, for instance for conducting clinical trials and sharing data between regulators of medicines and medical devices.

Predictive and preventative healthcare

The 10 Year Plan also states that every child born in the UK from a certain date will have a full genomic profile done, highlighting again the importance of the Data Bill. This will “create a new genomics population health service, accessible to all, by the end of the decade. We will implement universal newborn genomic testing and population based polygenic risk scoring alongside other emerging diagnostic tools, enabling early identification and intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases”.

Having the genomic profile will help healthcare professionals to understand whether the individual may be prone to certain issues later life. If they are, then predictive and preventative care can anticipate need, rather than just reacting to it.

Currently we have more pressure and burden at the end of life spectrum, but with proactive healthcare this could be relieved. Clearly genomic profiling involves huge amounts of data and research and there will be a need to build in a level of consent or disclaimers to the data being used in this way.

The future looks bright

The Government’s 10 Year Plan sets out some ambitious changes, however, there are already technology solutions being used that can support the many requirements that the new community healthcare hubs will need in place. Working together, trusted suppliers and technology and clinical leaders will be able to share and build on current good practice to achieve these goals, ultimately delivering safe, personal and effective healthcare.

Hema Purohit is Founder of Lotus Advisory & Consulting Ltd. She has over 30 years of experience combining hands-on expertise with visionary leadership. Most recently, she was Director and CTO for Healthcare & Public Sector across EMEA at Microsoft. Other key roles include Director for Government & Public Sector in the UK and Ireland at Google Cloud. Her career has been defined by driving large-scale change, leveraging deep expertise in AI, multi-cloud strategies, and innovative architectural design to create lasting impact.

Further reading: Catherine Dampney, NHS South Central & West Commissioning Support Unit discusses how collaboration and sharing skills are helping bring to life the Government strategy to help use NHS data more effectively and save lives. She describes how Secure Data Environments (SDEs) are supporting researchers by providing easy, secure access to NHS data, work that is at the heart of the Government’s Open Data Saves Lives strategy.