Blog | AI is no longer the headline

Reflections from my first Digital Health Summer School

Attending Digital Health Summer School for the first time, I expected to leave talking about technology. Instead, I left thinking about healthcare.

Of course, there were fascinating discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), interoperability, shared care records and digital innovation. But what stayed with me wasn’t the technology itself. It was a growing sense that many of the processes we’ve built our health and care system around were designed for a very different era.

To paraphrase one of the panel speakers, we’re using technology to rehash paper-based systems and expecting a different outcome.

That left me wondering whether we’ve reached a turning point. Perhaps the next phase of NHS digital transformation isn’t about making today’s healthcare system more digital. It’s about redesigning how care is organised and delivered.

AI is becoming part of healthcare’s infrastructure

Not long ago, healthcare conferences were dominated by questions about whether AI would ever have a meaningful role in clinical practice. Today, that feels like the wrong conversation.

Throughout the conference, AI was discussed less as a standalone innovation and more as an increasingly important capability within modern healthcare. Like electronic patient records, cloud computing and the internet before it, AI is moving from disruptive technology towards accepted infrastructure.

We no longer ask whether healthcare organisations should embrace the internet. We judge them on how effectively they use it. Increasingly, the same will be true of AI.

The real differentiator won’t simply be whether organisations adopt AI, but how safely and effectively they embed it into clinical workflows, decision-making and care delivery. The aim shouldn’t be to introduce AI for its own sake, but to reduce avoidable work, support better decisions and improve outcomes – while maintaining clinical oversight, clear accountability and trust.

Redesigning care means redefining success

One question ran through many of the conversations at the event:

If we were designing healthcare today, knowing what we know now, would we build it this way?

That’s a profoundly different mindset. The opportunity isn’t simply to replace paper processes with digital ones. It’s to reconsider why those processes exist, whether they still serve patients and professionals well, and how care could work differently when people and information are better connected.

It also changes how we define success.

Digital transformation is often justified through productivity gains, efficiency improvements and cost savings. Those measures matter, particularly in a system facing sustained operational and financial pressure. But they don’t tell us whether transformation has improved care.

Are patients receiving better care? Are outcomes improving? Are clinicians spending less time navigating systems and more time caring for people? Are we reducing inequalities? Are we enabling healthier lives?

Digital maturity shouldn’t be measured by the number of systems we deploy. It should be measured by the complexity we remove and the value we create for patients, communities and healthcare professionals.

We shouldn’t mistake doing more for achieving more. Productivity measures output; value measures impact.

Neighbourhood health is where redesign becomes real

This feels particularly relevant as more care is delivered through primary care, community services and neighbourhood teams.

Neighbourhood health and integrated care featured prominently throughout the conference. What surprised me wasn’t disagreement about their importance, but how differently people understood what they meant in practice.

What exactly is a neighbourhood? Who leads it? How does it fit alongside existing organisations and responsibilities?

Those questions reveal the scale of the opportunity. Neighbourhood health isn’t simply about moving services closer to home. It gives us the chance to organise care around the needs of patients and communities rather than the boundaries of institutions.

That means enabling professionals across primary care, community services, social care and other local partners to work together, intervene earlier and coordinate support around the whole person.

Sharing our MDT App prototype at the event brought that opportunity to life. Designed to support neighbourhood care, it helps bring together the professionals involved in a patient’s care, giving them a shared view and a way to collaborate across organisational boundaries.

What resonated wasn’t simply the technology. It was the potential to bring multidisciplinary teams together around a shared understanding of a patient’s needs.

Patients don’t experience their care as a series of organisations, departments or services. They experience it as one journey, even when the infrastructure behind it is fragmented. Neighbourhood health is an opportunity to make the system see – and support – that same whole journey.

What if information no longer had to be sent?

One of the most thought-provoking moments came in response to a question from the audience:

In a truly connected health and care system, would referrals and discharge summaries need to perform the same role they do today?

The information they contain will remain vital. But currently, it is often packaged into a document and sent from one service to another because each organisation holds a different part of the patient’s record.

What if everyone involved in a patient’s care could instead access and contribute to the same up-to-date information? Rather than waiting for a letter, email or system message, the information would already be there – shared with the people who need it.

We would still need clear clinical requests, agreed care plans and accountability for decisions. But documents would no longer have to carry information between disconnected systems.

The information isn’t outdated. The mechanism may be.

The future isn’t simply about transferring information more efficiently. It’s about creating a shared understanding of a person’s needs and care.

What if coding became an output rather than a task?

The same thinking applies to clinical coding.

For decades, we’ve asked clinicians to translate the complexity of healthcare into structured codes because computers couldn’t interpret natural language reliably. That can create additional work and interrupt the natural process of documenting care.

AI has the potential to change that relationship.

What if clinicians could document care naturally, while technology proposed the relevant codes and structured data in the background? Clinicians would retain oversight and confirm what was recorded, but would no longer have to construct every element manually.

Reliable, well-governed coding remains essential. The opportunity isn’t to remove clinical responsibility, but to make the process more accurate and less burdensome.

Rather than continually asking clinicians to adapt to technology, technology should increasingly adapt to clinicians.

The common thread is reducing friction

Reflecting on the event, I realised that many of the discussions were really about the same thing: reducing friction.

Friction between organisations. Between systems. Between professionals. And, most importantly, between patients and the care they need.

Whether we were discussing AI, neighbourhood health, interoperability, shared records, analytics or care coordination, the destination was remarkably consistent:

Make healthcare easier to navigate.
Make information easier to use and share.
Make collaboration easier to achieve.

Technology alone won’t redesign care or make organisations work as one. But it can remove many of the practical barriers that get in the way.

That, to me, is what digital transformation should be about: removing complexity, not adding technology.

Looking beyond digital

As a first-time attendee, I arrived expecting to hear about the future of digital health. I left thinking about the future of healthcare.

Digital transformation has happened in waves. First, we digitised healthcare information and processes. Then we began connecting them through interoperability, shared records and better coordination.

The next phase should be more ambitious: using those foundations to redesign care around people rather than organisations, collaboration rather than boundaries and value rather than activity.

AI, interoperability and shared records aren’t the destination. They’re the foundations of a simpler, more connected and more human model of care.

Patients don’t experience the technology. They experience the care.

The true measure of digital transformation is whether that care feels more joined up, easier to navigate and designed around the people it exists to serve.

About the author

Dr Krishna Vakharia

Chief Medical Officer – Health

Krishna oversees multiple areas at Optum UK, including EMIS‑X, EMIS-Web and population health products, amongst others. She is an NHS GP, appraiser and regular dermatology examiner, with additional qualifications in women’s health and dermatology.