The chancellor’s Spring Budget confirmed measures to protect real-terms funding levels for the NHS in England, with an extra £2.5 billion pledged for day-to-day activities and a total budget of £164.9 billion for 2024-25. But measures were also announced to unlock greater productivity across the health system, driven largely by technological and digital transformation.

The £3.4bn package will double the investment in technological and digital innovation in the NHS in England, says the Treasury, significantly reducing the time doctors spend using poor IT, freeing up capacity, and improving treatment.

Investment in NHS technology will be central to a wider NHS productivity plan, including workforce productivity improvements set out in its Long Term Workforce Plan. The Budget document says this will enable the NHS to commit to 1.9-per-cent average productivity growth from 2025-26 to 2029-30, rising to 2 per cent over the final two years – generating £35bn of cumulative savings by 2029-30.

Access and service improvements

The £3.4bn additional funding will be broken down across different areas of digital improvement. Some £430m will be invested to transform access and services for patients, giving them more choice and the ability to manage and attend appointments virtually. This, says the document, will yield savings of £2.5bn over five years, helping to tackle waiting lists, reduce waiting times, and ensure patients get the care they need more quickly. As part of this strategy, the NHS App will become “the single front door” through which patients can access NHS services and manage their care, saving patients time when ordering repeat prescriptions and managing appointments, and providing them with more choice and quicker access to their own health information. Through the App, a new digital health check will be made available to enable individuals at high risk of early onset conditions to be identified early, as well as creating easy access to vaccination or screening appointments. Citizens will be given a single digital access point for information about NHS services, including which services are available, opening times, and contact details.

Data and automation

To reduce time spent on unproductive administrative tasks by NHS staff, £1 billion will be invested to transform the use of data, enabling more than £3 billion of savings over five years, says the Budget document. The funding will help scale up and accelerate the use of technologies to automate these processes, so staff can divert more of their time to delivering better care for patients.

As part of this programme, pilots will be run to test the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate back-office functions – foe example, automating the writing and clinical coding of notes, and discharging summaries and GP letters. Pilots in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital have found that this technology can more than halve the time spent on discharge summaries. If rolled out across the NHS, this could unlock an annual productivity benefit of £500-850 million, predicts the Treasury document.

All NHS staff will be provided with digital passports and access to a new NHS Staff App. Its purpose will be to reduce the bureaucracy involved in moving between different parts of the NHS, and eliminate the need to redo training courses, so more time can be spent on patient care.

The Federated Data Platform (FDP) will be accelerated to bring together operational and integrated care system data currently stored on separate systems to every trust in the country by the end of 2026-27. The FDP could also support a 10-per-cent improvement in theatre utilisation, freeing up consultants to undertake an extra 200,000 operations procedures a year, according to the Budget document.

IT and equipment upgrades

More than half of the extra funding, £2 billion worth, will be invested to update fragmented and outdated IT systems across the NHS, says the Budget document, reducing the reported 13 million hours wasted by doctors every year on poor IT and enabling up to £4 billion of savings over five years. This, says the document, will lay the groundwork for the NHS to embrace technologies such as AI. Steps will include:

• upgrading IT systems, scaling up existing use of AI, and ensuring all NHS staff are equipped with modern computing technology;
• ensuring all NHS trusts have electronic patient records by March 2026, ensuring patients can easily access their records across all NHS systems;
• upgrading more than 100 MRI scanners with AI and enabling scans to be delivered up to 35 per cent more quickly;
• digitising transfers of care, ensuring patients can move more quickly and easily between care settings.

NHS England will start reporting against new productivity metrics regularly from the second half of 2024-25, at national, integrated care board, and trust levels. New incentives will also be introduced to reward providers who deliver productivity improvement at a local level, with more detail to be set out in the summer.

Maternity care will be another area to benefit from investment, with the Government and NHS England injecting £35 million over three years to improve maternity safety across England, with specialist training for staff, more midwives, and greater support to ensure maternity services act on women’s experiences to improve care. This package will include £9 million over three years to help provide maternity services with the tools and training to reduce avoidable brain injuries in childbirth. Further investment in training to ensure the NHS workforce has the skills needed to provide ever safer care has also been promised.

Funding gaps remain

Responding to the Budget, NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard said: “Adopting the latest technology is already having an impact on the way we deliver services for patients – including getting your prescriptions on the NHS App and virtual wards, which let people recover at home. The significant £3.4bn investment in capital to fund new technology means the NHS can now commit to deliver 2-per-cent annual productivity growth in the final two years of the next Parliament, which will unlock tens of billions of savings.”

Chief executive of NHS Providers Sir Julian Hartley welcomed the extra £2.5bn for day-to-day NHS spending and the announcement of more investment in digital and technology. But, warning that this will only offer “temporary respite” from the NHS’s financial pressures, he also reiterated previous calls for “long-term, multi-year investment in the health service”.

In addition, he highlighted funding gaps elsewhere, saying: “We also need to see a boost in capital investment alongside wider access to strategic capital investment across acute, specialist, mental health, ambulance and community services to fix the record-high maintenance backlog and the deteriorating NHS estate in which staff are working and patients are being treated.” And he pointed to the “major funding crises” across local government and social care.

Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, also welcomed the technology-focused investment but he warned “bigger productivity gains will only be realised if the NHS’s crumbling estates are addressed too” and called for a £6.4bn annual capital funding increase for the NHS.

“The promised £2.5bn boost for NHS budgets next year will scarcely touch the sides as the service faces the triple threat of ongoing industrial action, significant waiting lists, and uncertainty over staff pay,” he said. “This also raises eyebrows over how achievable the new productivity target may end up being without greater investment. Rather than improve the situation, this may just about stop things from worsening.”

Nuffield Trust chief executive Thea Stein said the productivity drive needed a rethink. “New technology will take time, patience and working together with NHS leaders and staff to yield results,” she said. “In addition, the NHS budget hasn’t kept up with cost pressures, which have forced the NHS to regularly raid capital budgets, near to £1 billion this year alone. There is no guarantee we won’t see this again.”

She added: “This precarious financial backdrop across health and care means that ahead of a UK general election and given the desire to turn around long waits, access to care, and improve crumbling infrastructure, all political parties should be very cautious about promises that can’t be delivered.”