techUK Roundtable with Sonia Patel NHS CTO: Building the NHS Digital & Data Blueprint
On July 29, 2025, NHS England CTO Sonia Patel led a comprehensive roundtable with industry representatives to discuss the development of the NHS Digital & Data Blueprint. This session marked a significant milestone in the NHS's architectural transformation journey, representing a fundamental shift from organisational-centric to person-centered healthcare delivery approaches.
Please access the presentation slides here
Architectural Transformation Progress
The "Let's Talk Architecture" campaign, launched in March at Rewired, has successfully engaged over 1,000 stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem through various forums including leadership think tanks, regional networks, and international healthcare leader sessions. The feedback revealed strong consensus around the critical importance of standards as the foundation of future healthcare systems, with particular emphasis on adopting open international standards through an emerging "international standards first" policy.
Industry participants consistently highlighted the need for stronger enforcement mechanisms and clearer accountability structures for supplier adherence to standards. There was also significant demand for longer-term budgeting approaches and transparent disinvestment strategies to move away from the current year-by-year uncertainty that hampers both NHS planning and industry investment decisions.
Person-Centered Capability Revolution
Chief Enterprise Architect Lee Jenkins presented groundbreaking work on reimagining healthcare architecture from the patient's perspective rather than organizational silos. This innovative approach involves mapping business capabilities as patients actually experience them during healthcare journeys, moving beyond traditional programmatic approaches to create truly person-centered care delivery models.
The methodology starts with specific patient pathways, such as maternity care, to understand which business capabilities patients encounter and what services they interact with throughout their healthcare journey. This represents a fundamental architectural shift that aligns digital and data delivery with patient needs rather than internal organizational structures or commercial considerations.
Technology Blueprint Framework
Sonia Patel outlined the comprehensive five-pillar framework for the NHS Technology Blueprint. The architectural model and standards pillar establishes high-level principles while directing users to repositories of artifacts and frameworks that will provide consistency across the NHS ecosystem. The infrastructure and open standards component focuses on clarifying the technology stack foundation and international standards alignment, with particular attention to reducing the disproportionate spending on integration challenges that currently plague the system.
The delivery models pillar addresses the critical question of what should be delivered nationally versus locally, providing clarity on degrees of freedom for local innovation while ensuring essential consistency. The workforce and digital skills component recognizes that digital transformation requires not just professional workforce development but broader capability building across the entire NHS workforce. Finally, the data trust and insight-driven care pillar encompasses a comprehensive data strategy spanning from semantic vocabularies to practical usability for patients, staff, and NHS operational leaders.
Future Engagement and Implementation
The NHS England team committed to continuing iterative engagement with industry partners through the establishment of technical communities focused on detailed interoperability discussions. They acknowledged the need for realistic implementation timescales and transparent roadmaps that allow industry partners to plan their research and development investments effectively.