For UK GP practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs), the NHS Long Term Plan is not just a high-level policy document; it is a direct roadmap for the future of care delivery. The latest updates for 2025 double down on a core strategic shift: moving care from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from reactive to preventative. For a busy practice manager or GP partner, the key is understanding how to translate these national ambitions into practical, on-the-ground actions.
This guide breaks down the three core digital transformation targets that will shape your practice's operations over the next few years—the "digital front door," remote patient monitoring, and deeper integration with your Integrated Care System (ICS)—and highlights the types of technologies essential for meeting them.
1. The "digital front door": streamlining patient access
The national ambition to "end the 8am scramble" is a central plank of the Long Term Plan. This means moving beyond a simple telephone-first model to a more sophisticated "digital front door" that gives patients multiple ways to access care and ensures their requests are managed efficiently.
The national target: To provide patients with more convenient access and to ensure practices can manage demand more effectively, often through a "total triage" model. This is supported by changes to the GP contract that mandate online consultation tools remain open and accessible.
What this means for your practice:
- Online consultation tools are now standard: Platforms like Anima, eConsult, or Accurx Triage are essential for gathering structured information from patients before they speak to a clinician. This allows for more effective prioritisation and routing.
- AI-powered triage is the next step: The next evolution involves using AI to intelligently sort and signpost patient requests. AI can help identify urgent cases, handle administrative queries automatically, and direct patients to the most appropriate service (e.g., community pharmacy, self-care, or a GP appointment), freeing up significant administrative time.
- The NHS App is your primary patient portal: Practices are expected to encourage and support patient use of the NHS App for booking appointments, ordering repeat prescriptions, and viewing their records. This is the national standard for patient-facing digital services.
2. Remote patient monitoring: proactive care for long-term conditions
A core goal of the plan is to manage more patients with long-term conditions proactively in their own homes, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions. This is being enabled by a significant push into remote patient monitoring (RPM) and virtual wards.
The national target: To scale up the use of RPM for patients with chronic conditions like hypertension, heart failure, and COPD, allowing clinical teams to monitor vital signs and intervene early.
What this means for your practice:
- New workflows for ANPs and clinical pharmacists: Advanced practitioners will increasingly be responsible for managing cohorts of patients on virtual wards. Their role will involve monitoring incoming data from devices (like blood pressure monitors or pulse oximeters), triaging alerts, and conducting virtual reviews to adjust treatment plans.
- Investment in RPM platforms: PCNs and practices will need to procure and implement RPM platforms that can securely receive data from patient devices, present it in a clear clinical dashboard, and generate alerts based on pre-defined parameters.
- Population health analytics: To do this effectively, practices will need to use their clinical system data (often with tools like EMIS-X Analytics) to risk-stratify their populations and identify the patients who would benefit most from being enrolled in a remote monitoring programme.
3. Integrated Care Systems (ICS): working beyond your practice walls
The Long Term Plan formalises the move to Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), which requires practices and PCNs to work more collaboratively with secondary care, community services, and social care. Digital interoperability is the essential glue that holds this together.
The national target: To improve the flow of data between different care settings, creating a more seamless experience for patients and clinicians. This is underpinned by national standards like FHIR for data exchange.
What this means for your practice:
- Shared care records are becoming standard: Clinicians will be expected to use their local shared care record to view information from hospitals and other services, and to contribute their own data to create a single, unified view of the patient.
- Cross-organisational workflows: Expect to see more integrated digital workflows, such as direct e-referrals from your EHR into hospital systems, and the electronic transfer of discharge summaries directly into your practice's document management system (often via Docman).
- Supporting your team: In this more complex, digitally-enabled environment, clinician productivity is key. Tools that provide rapid, evidence-based answers to clinical questions, like iatroX, become even more valuable. By reducing the time clinicians spend searching for information, you free up their capacity to manage these new, integrated digital workflows and focus on complex patient care.
Conclusion: a strategic roadmap for digital maturity
The NHS Long Term Plan's digital targets are not abstract goals; they are a clear set of instructions for the future of general practice. By focusing on three key areas—building a robust digital front door, embracing remote patient monitoring, and engaging with the digital infrastructure of your local ICS—your practice can not only meet the national requirements but also create a more efficient, sustainable, and patient-centred model of care for the years to come.