Putting citizens at the centre of neighbourhood health digitisation UK

Guest blog by Lloyd Humphries, Managing Director at Cogniss and Micheal Odling-Smee, Co-founder at Aire Innovate

Neighbourhood health systems are under increasing pressure to deliver more coordinated, preventative and personalised care, closer to where people live. Across the UK, Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs) are being asked not only to redesign services, but to do so in a way that reflects the lived experience of patients and communities.

Yet many digital transformation efforts still begin with systems and structures, rather than people. The result is often fragmented pathways that reflect organisational boundaries more than patient journeys.

The ambition behind putting citizens at the centre requires a different starting point: designing care with communities, not just for them.

This is the principle underpinning a new collaboration between Cogniss and Aire Innovate, developed following work led by NHS Kent & Medway Integrated Care Board. It reflects a growing recognition that sustainable neighbourhood health models depend on meaningful citizen participation in service design, not just service access.

From concept to co-designed digital pathways in a single day

The partnership introduces Digitise Your Pathway in a Day, a facilitated neighbourhood health hackathon model that enables citizens, clinicians, voluntary sector organisations and local partners to co-design and prototype digital care pathways within a single working session.

Rather than lengthy specification cycles followed by delayed implementation, the approach brings stakeholders together to map real-world care journeys and immediately translate them into working digital prototypes.

The model combines the strengths of both organisations. Cogniss provides a no-code patient engagement environment that enables rapid creation of citizen-facing digital tools. Aire Innovate brings workflow automation and interoperability capability, ensuring that what is designed in the session can connect across existing systems and clinical processes.

Work led by NHS Kent & Medway Integrated Care Board demonstrated that when clinicians, digital leaders and communities collaborate in this way, ideas can move rapidly into functional, testable pathways. Importantly, this creates a practical route to supporting the ambitions of more integrated neighbourhood-based care as set out in national health reform priorities.

The emphasis is not on replacing existing systems, but on enabling faster alignment between people’s needs and the services designed to meet them.

Building scalable neighbourhood infrastructure around people, not systemsBuilding scalable neighbourhood infrastructure around people, not systems

A key challenge for neighbourhood health programmes is scalability. While local innovation is strong, scaling often introduces complexity: multiple tools, fragmented governance models and duplicated integration effort.

The Digitise Your Pathway in a Day approach is designed to address this by enabling pathways to be built on a shared digital architecture. This allows multiple neighbourhood services to be created, iterated and expanded without introducing separate point solutions for each pathway.

In practice, this means one coordinated environment where citizens, clinicians, carers and community services can interact through a connected system of care delivery. It reduces duplication, supports interoperability and simplifies governance by maintaining a consistent digital and clinical safety framework.

For citizens, the impact is more fundamental. Rather than navigating services that reflect organisational structures, they experience pathways designed around their needs, their conditions and their communities.

For Integrated Neighbourhood Teams, it provides a faster route from service design to implementation, enabling continuous improvement based on real-world feedback.

Ultimately, the collaboration between Cogniss and Aire Innovate reflects a shared belief: that neighbourhood health systems work best when they are built with citizens at the centre, supported by technology that enables collaboration rather than constraining it.

As neighbourhood models continue to evolve, the opportunity is not simply to digitise existing pathways, but to redesign them in partnership with the communities they serve, creating care that is more connected, more responsive and more human by design.

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