Unleashing the potential of the NHS Federated Data Platform

May 13, 2025“We need something like this in our country!” This is a typical comment we hear from leaders across international publicly-funded health systems, when they understand the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) programme and the potential impact it promises. The FDP platform is integrating and standardising data across the health service, aiming to put accurate and timely insights into the hands of clinical and operational decision-makers in a way that could transform NHS working practices. In so doing, it provides a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to transform performance, patient experience and health outcomes. With rollout of the platform nearly complete, now is the time to build on these foundations and deliver the intended value from the £330m technology investment, unlocking improvements in health system performance and outcomes that will benefit everyone. 

In the process, FDP could be the key to making NHS data one of the world’s most consequential health datasets. As a single integrated, secure software platform installed across the NHS estate, it has the reach and capability to sit at the heart of system-wide digital transformation that could unlock as much as £15-25 billion per annum to UK taxpayers at full scale. By integrating 50+ million patient records, bringing consistency to how data is organised, and providing NHS staff with secure access to standardised data and tools in one place, FDP has a real chance to address many of the NHS’s data-related challenges and support improvements in NHS efficiency and patient care. It could solve the interoperability challenge; become the primary vehicle for a fully unified patient record; drive at-scale delivery of innovative applied AI solutions; and underpin the cross-organisation co-ordination of care necessary for the Government’s shifts towards community-based care and prevention over treatment. 

“Having joined-up decision-making across care settings would be a truly brilliant outcome from the integrated system data that FDP is facilitating,” according to Daniel Elkeles, incoming CEO of NHS Providers and outgoing CEO of London Ambulance Service. “It is an opportunity that the NHS must not miss”.

At the same time, we know from our global public sector and tech transformation work and from the NHS’ own track record of large-scale technology programmes – that the deployment of technology alone is not enough to unlock value. A concerted effort is needed to drive business change and adoption for FDP to help NHS leaders solve the service’s most pressing performance challenges. This means driving extensive usage by clinicians, managers, and patients; developing and deploying products on the platform that directly address key operational challenges; integration of data from primary and secondary care with acute care data; fostering an ecosystem of innovators finding new and safe ways to put the data to use; and linking FDP to adjacent digital programmes. 

The transformative potential of FDP for a comprehensive national healthcare service

FDP promises a simple but transformative vision to revolutionise how the NHS uses data to improve outcomes for patients: one shared, secure platform for data across the NHS; standardised core operational datasets and health records; data interoperable across organisations for clinicians and patients; rapid deployment and scale of new innovation across the NHS; and the safe deployment of applied AI into healthcare delivery. 

What could this future world look like? 

Integrated data and AI enabling efficient and well-coordinated delivery of care, supported by a single care record:

• A diabetes patient could receive a notification via the NHS App to take their daily exercise, prompted by remote monitoring of their physical activity against a health promotion and longevity plan generated by a clinically appropriate applied AI, based on their lifetime care record and refined with their GP
• A clinician could benefit from automated decision support, driven by the full care record of the patient in front of them and the full history of patient outcomes in the NHS. It guides a clinician to the optimal treatment, offers the next best action or referral they could take, and orders tests and prescriptions without duplication
• A patient with a clinically diagnosed condition could see and manage their own health data, helping them better understand and adhere to their NHS care plan, while staying in control of how their personal information is used 

Interoperable data, hosted on a shared, secure and smart platform, driving innovation in how the NHS delivers its core operations and reduces costs:

• An Outpatient Director could sponsor the development of a new product that improves care navigation, and see this application built in weeks using FDP’s off-the-shelf development tools. The solution is built from the start to scale, resulting in up to 90% savings to scale nationally compared to the typical approach pre-FDP
• A cost improvement team looking to manage non-pay spend could search the FDP platform, find an innovative product that meets their needs, and complete procurement and installation in one click, to start driving cost-out benefits with their teams immediately
• A care planning applied AI model could track real-time movement of patient cohorts along care pathways between acute and community settings, identify bottlenecks in patient flow and redirect capacity accordingly to help reduce wait times 

A gateway between FDP, secure data environments (SDEs) and the government’s plan for a national data library allowing the UK to make transformational medical gains:

• An academic researcher could connect to national-scale anonymised health data and use this in their research, accelerating development of life-saving therapies by analysing treatment outcomes and uncovering genetic markers of disease

How much do patients and the NHS stand to gain from these shifts? McKinsey’s research into the potential value that can be unlocked from digital and data use-cases deployed at scale suggests there is an opportunity equivalent to £15-25 billion per year in the UK.¹ As the illustrative examples show, FDP can play a critical role in realising this opportunity, driving better patient outcomes, improving productivity, and creating new opportunities to advance innovation at scale. 

At the same time, FDP can also allow Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to decommission duplicate warehousing and integration platforms, de-clutter the NHS digital estate and reduce the cost of maintaining duplicative or sub-scale applications. “We should start to see cash out in local systems as we can start to reduce our reliance on local infrastructure,” says Will Monaghan, Chief Digital Information Officer for two Midlands Trusts. Some Trusts who have implemented FDP’s theatre management tools are already decommissioning their outdated scheduling systems. This consolidation alone could mean that FDP would pay for itself.

Six ideas to unlock the FDP’s potential in the near term

While the potential is clear, achieving this value is not easy. Much work has been done already in driving the FDP programme. As the NHS looks to realise this future transformation, we see six ideas to ensure that the investment in a core technology platform can improve performance and patient outcomes:

Six ideas to unlock

1. Focus on ownership and value delivery now that the infrastructure is in place

The deployment of technology alone is not enough to unlock impact for patients – there also needs to be clarity about how the technology will be used to deliver clinical and operational value, how it will be integrated into workflows, and line leadership accountability for adopting and realising the benefits.

While there is visible program leadership from the Chief Data and Analytics Officer, there’s been less involvement from those responsible for delivering impact in priority areas, e.g., UEC, Elective, or Productivity. Best practice would be a joint delivery model that pairs the tech leadership with ‘active customers’ of proposed FDP products, accountable for shaping the development of those products before work on them commences, and ensuring their adoption, usage and impact at the front line. 

Secondly, while FDP has set out priority use case areas, currently these are high-level and do not clearly specify who the user will be or how they will improve operational or clinical outcomes through usage, how they will fit into current operations and technology architecture, and do not clearly define target impact and return on investment. That is to say, the use case roadmap lacks a clear business and financial blueprint, together with the corresponding change management support to implement. To address this, we would recommend FDP describes a clear narrative detailing the sequence of concrete use cases to be built in the short- to mid-term, with the value they seek to deliver defined in terms of explicit outcome targets, the target business and technology ‘architecture’ and what the deployment and change management approach looks like. 

2. Establish and back local Innovation Lighthouses to develop products in collaboration with the frontline

The off-the-shelf connectors, APIs, and front-end toolkits provided by FDP can reduce product build times by 50% or more. To harness this potential and ensure product quality and frontline impact, FDP needs clusters of market-leading teams to build products informed by real frontline challenges and guided by the centre in terms of priority areas of focus. 

To enable this, the NHS could fund a small number of Trusts or Heath Innovation Networks (HINs) to create Innovation Lighthouses where pools of multi-disciplinary technical talent (IT, data engineering, data science) and product expertise (UI/UX design, software dev, etc.) come together with experienced frontline managers and clinicians to create practical solutions that users love. These teams could be empowered to operate as agile product teams, taking advantage of FDP’s data model and rapid development tools to reduce the time taken to develop new innovations. 

Central support will be critical to ensure these products remain coherent: as well as providing a funded incentive mechanism aligned to priority use cases, the NHS  could back Lighthouses with cross-system hackathons and other development support, common standards and ways of working, and core network architecture requirements (e.g. security, IG, etc.). 

These lighthouse cases could then be promoted to national scale if they deliver measurable value. On the other hand, we should embrace – and celebrate – a ‘fail fast’ mechanism for the cases that don’t fully meet the criteria for national scaling. It will be just as important to create a culture of innovation as it is to increase the odds that new innovations can deliver scalable impact. 

3. Power up the Solution Exchange to make access easy for both Trusts and suppliers 

Scaling innovations on FDP can save as much as 90% of technology-related deployment and scale-up costs due to their reusability across the platform. This requires NHS-led innovation as described above. But this also requires a vibrant marketplace of high-quality, trusted, commercially viable and value-adding third party digital and applied AI products accessible via a ‘shop window’ that allows Trusts to identify, procure and implement chosen solutions to meet their needs. This is the vision for FDP’s ‘Solution Exchange’, but with FDP’s rollout approaching completion, suppliers are actively looking to understand what practical form the Solution Exchange will take and how it will operate, before committing to the make their products available on it.  

The Solution Exchange could support Trusts by accrediting products based on criteria like information governance (IG) compliance, clinical safety, usability and proven impact; by actively managing the catalogue, including bringing in new innovations aligned to needs across the system, elevating NHS-developed solutions, and pruning solutions that fail to live up to their promise; and by providing simple contracting mechanisms. 

Similarly, the Solution Exchange could support suppliers to invest by providing access to a development Sandbox and a standardised DevOps environment, simplifying the accreditation process, ensuring visibility of the catalogue to avoid duplication, and establishing appropriate IP protection.   

4. Launch a coordinated adoption and change management programme

Across multiple large-scale technology transformations, the evidence suggests that organisations need to invest approximately £1 on adoption and change management for every £1 they spend on technology. A lot of digital transformations fail to realise full benefits because they don’t do this or don’t do it well. In the case of FDP, even as the platform rollout moves ahead there are many frontline clinicians and managers who aren’t aware of the programme or what it could offer them, and there remain pockets of NHS technologists still to be won over to FDP’s potential.   

An FDP change management plan, led by the CEO and top team,  can lay out the ‘what, why and how’ of the vision, and help Trusts understand how they can benefit by focusing on the value delivery roadmap of use cases aligned to national priorities, and how they can access these solutions, including through the Solution Exchange. 

As part of the change management ‘offer’ from the centre to ensure staff are equipped to use the platform effectively, the NHS  could expand on the FDP Centre of Excellence to provide comprehensive role-based training and skill-building programmes, and provide ongoing support for new features. Alongside this it needs a performance management framework to ensure that all Trusts and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) establish FDP infrastructure and all core datasets are brought onto the platform by the end of 2025, with incentives for product usage. Ideally this could be two-way, with reciprocal mechanisms in place to inform platform improvements based on users’ feedback. 

To further drive adoption and usage, NHS could also invest in regional ‘change agent’ teams tasked with coordinating integrated product roll-out across the system, overseeing local product customisation, building pull for high-impact innovations, providing field training for users, and monitoring impact. 

5. Solve core data access challenges

If FDP is to truly enable  the NHS to deliver coordinated and integrated care (including a single patient record) and support the shift from hospital to community and from treatment to prevention, it will need to evolve current approaches to data integration and over time include GP- and even Local Authority-held data  that is currently outside the programme’s scope. As with any large-scale data programme, maintaining citizen trust and the ethical use of data is paramount. But there are ways forward by acknowledging the patient as owner of their data, setting the expectation that wherever in the NHS a patient seeks care they will be able to find their full data, expanding the FDP mandate to include primary care data, and adjusting legislation if necessary.  

Similarly, changes to data controllership and streamlined information governance (IG) to enable cross-organisational information sharing could help the NHS to maximise benefits from FDP. In place of the current requirement for each use case to be approved by every data controller (of whom there are thousands, each with their own interpretation of the legal basis), the NHS could establish a clearer ‘precedent set’ model in which central approval cascades to data controllers via templated information, with liability absorbed by the national team. For FDP, this would mean that the IG  developed for new products that depend on cross-organisation information sharing could be worked through once, nationally, without the need for re-review processes in every adopting NHS Trust. The goal here is to strike the appropriate balance between robust and rigorous data controls and encouraging (and de-risking) innovation by establishing relevant ‘case law’ and streamlined governance processes to allow new use solutions to move forward. 

6. Make “FDP-first” a norm for any work using health data  

As with any technology, FDP will thrive the more its used. To make this happen, the FDP programme needs to fully convince Trust and ICB digital leaders  of the value of FDP, and change mindsets from uncertainty to advocacy. While the hearts and minds campaign could take place in parallel with the national narrative and adoption programme described above, the NHS could also make clear that an ‘FDP-first’ approach is expected, with both explicit guidance and financial incentives for the removal of technical debt and a high bar for digital procurement not aligned to the FDP platform. “FDP gives us the platform we need to enable joined-up care nationally,” explains Will Monaghan. “Now we just have to use it rather than procuring locally.”

Looking beyond the NHS’s current plan for the usage of its data, FDP can also be central to how NHS data is integrated into adjacent programmes. “To fully harness the investment to bring health data together in the FDP we should make sure that, with the appropriate pseudonymisation, research governance and permissions, it can be used by researchers” says Kristin-Anne Rutter, Executive Director at Cambridge University Health Partners.  With its structuring and management of core health data, the NHS could position FDP as a data asset feeding the national health data research service and subnational secure data environments (SDEs). For it to be usable in this way would need enrichment of FDP’s core data model with details of origin data sources and metric calculations. Similarly, bidirectional flows into patient portals such as the NHS App would enhance their value, empowering patients to better understand their care, and enabling write-back to the electronic patient record from patients’ own recording of non-NHS treatments, wellness observations, consent responses and so on.  

Conclusion

Fulfilling the transformative potential of FDP will need a coordinated focus on value and outcomes across the NHS: from executive leadership, to operational delivery, to frontline usage and patient support. It will also need spirited buy-in from across the healthcare ecosystem of policy-makers, NHS operators and clinicians, suppliers, life sciences organisations, academia and beyond – all of whom stand to gain from its success.  If the NHS can put these pieces in place, it can unleash the full potential of the FDP vision, unlock an opportunity for sector-leading digital transformation, improve health system performance, and significantly improve patient care and outcomes. 

_{Note from the authors: In preparing this article we have interviewed a variety of health system leaders from across the NHS and beyond, and we have drawn on McKinsey’s experience working with the NHS and with healthcare clients internationally.}

_{¹McKinsey’s Digital Value Assessment evaluates how much health systems stand to gain by implementing next-generation clinical systems, optimising patient flow, capacity and supply chain distribution across healthcare systems, enabling patient’s management of their own care, and supporting population health for better health promotion and disease prevention. It builds on an extensive evaluation of the potential impact of these use-cases from academic literature, and assesses what proportion of the total opportunity still remains to be captured within a country or health system.}