Care in the Digital Age: delivery plan 2025 to 2026

Care in the Digital Age: Delivery Plan 2025-26

Strategic Context

In support of the Digital Health and Care Strategy, the Scottish Government and COSLA published the first Delivery Plan in 2022-23 and have produced updated plans each year since. You can view all previous iterations of our delivery plans at Digital Healthcare Scotland along with case studies and testimonials that demonstrate impact: Delivery Plan 2024-25 - Digital Healthcare Scotland.

The Digital Health and Care Strategy’s Vision is:

To improve the care and wellbeing of people in Scotland by making best use of digital technologies in the design and delivery of services.

This supports delivery of the right care, in the right place, at the right time, providing whole of life support; active, independent living; and care that is proactive and personalised.

The three aims that support this Vision are:

Aim 1: Citizens have access to, and greater control over, their own health and care data – as well as access to the digital information, tools and services they need to help maintain and improve their health and wellbeing.

Aim 2: Health and care services are built on people-centred, safe, secure and ethical digital foundations which allow staff to record, access and share relevant information across the health and care system, and feel confident in their use of digital technology, in order to improve the delivery of care.

Aim 3: Health and care planners, researchers and innovators have secure access to the data they need in order to increase the efficiency of our health and care systems, and develop new and improved ways of working.

A year of delivery, a year of renewed focus

Since the publication of the last Delivery Plan there have been a number of major developments driving a renewed focus.

The Reform and Renewal agenda set out by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in June 2024, and the First Minister in late January 2025, have more recently been manifested in several over-arching Strategies that highlight both the critical role of Digital Health and Care overall, and the importance of many of the agreed programmes and projects that will underpin those ambitions:

• the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan, published in March 2025
• the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework, published in June 2025.
• Scotland’s Population Health Framework, published in June 2025.

The First Minister’s statement on Renewal emphasised four priorities that would deliver improved care as:

• improving access to treatment
• shifting the balance of care
• improving access to health and social care services through digital and technological innovation
• prevention – ensuring we work with people to prevent illness and more proactively meet their needs.

While we have consistently highlighted Digital’s key role in delivering improved access, supporting a shift to care delivered at home or in the community, and enabling preventative care, the First Minister’s statement confirms Digital as a central priority in its own right within this renewed focus. In support of this, the recently published Operational Improvement Plan references specific work set out in this Delivery Plan: the personalised digital health and care service comprising the Digital Front Door, the Digital Health and Care Record (previously referred to as the Integrated Social Care and Health Record), and the National Digital Platform; the Digital Dermatology Service; the expansion of Hospital At Home and other remote care and self-monitoring services such Near Me and Connect Me; NHS inform; the roll-out of CHI across local government; Digital Mental Health therapies; and the national roll-out of digital theatre scheduling.

The Digital Front Door in particular will be a major public-facing programme that will, over time, significantly change how people interact with services. Launching with a specific cohort in Lanarkshire in December 2025, the service will develop iteratively with functionality and services being further developed in response to user feedback and from our experience. A national roll-out plan will be published later this year for reference, and you can find out more about our plans at Digital Healthcare Scotland.

The Service Renewal Framework sets out five key principles for Renewal:

1. Prevention Principle: Prevention across the continuum of care

2. People Principle: Care designed around people rather than the ‘system’ or ‘services’

3. Community Principle: More care in the community rather than a hospital focused model

4. Population Principle: Population planning, rather than along boundaries

5. Digital Principle: Reflecting societal expectations and system needs

Again, while Digital is highlighted as a Principle in its own right, it plays a key cross-cutting role in supporting the realisation of the other Principles and is referenced extensively throughout the Framework. When the Framework highlights the importance of delivering significant, positive improvement in how people experience health and social care in Scotland; delivering care that is people-led; or empowering people to be more in charge of their care; or shifting care from hospital to home or community settings; these are all long-standing arguments supporting the development, implementation, and national roll-out of digital service options.

Supporting these overall Strategies within the Renewal and Reform agenda, our commitment to the positive impact of Digital therefore remains. We reiterate the role of Digital in health and social care services in empowering people, liberating those who deliver health and care, and creating capacity, productivity, and improved insights in the system. Digital also has the potential to reduce inequality in care provision and enhance access to services; however, we are ever-mindful that not everyone has easy access to such options and that services must be made as available and as accessible as possible. Having delivered the Digital Inclusion Programme, we are working to embed its recommendations in our existing health and social care services and future service design.

In meeting our ambitions, our aim overall is to encourage a ‘Digital First’ mindset, where public expectations are met regarding the wider use of digital options, and those providing care actively consider how their work and services can be reshaped and improved. This means all of us working in the sector considering how services and support could be better delivered through digital technology; and recognising that many people will, over time, have increased expectations and feel empowered to ask why a digital option is not readily available or accessible.

This Delivery Plan therefore represents a transitional year, where we provide an update on progress to date while developing a refocused approach for 2026-27 and beyond as we consider, in practical terms, what a more explicit Digital First approach means for our work and priorities in support of the three over-arching health and social care strategies highlighted above.

Our future focus

We aim to approach these challenges iteratively, accepting that this work cannot be achieved immediately. In the short term, we will embed and mainstream innovations and services that we know have been successful, such as Connect Me, Near Me, Hospital at Home, Digital Mental Health therapies, and the use of Microsoft 365. Having laid these foundations, we will develop and deliver innovations that will improve and reshape how people interact with our services, such as the Digital Front Door, digital theatre scheduling, digital dermatology, and the cloud-based Shared Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). From our experience here we will look further forward to explore how we can optimise the use of rapidly emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. We are already working with stakeholders, the Third Sector, and colleagues in the Scottish AI Alliance to explore public attitudes to the use of such technology and will publish an AI Policy Framework later this year.

Underpinning all of this is our ongoing work in ensuring the effective, ethical, efficient and secure use of data. We have published a further annual update to the Health and Social Care Data Strategy, available at Data Strategy for Health and Social Care 2025 Update: Our progress and priorities.

Achievements to date

There have been several achievements in the past year, summarised below. In many cases we will look to build on these successes, whether upscaling or mainstreaming these programmes or developing additional functionality.

Digital Inclusion Programme

In April 2023, we launched the first phase of the £2m Digital Inclusion Programme, with thirteen funded projects focusing on digital inclusion in mental health and housing. The second phase, ‘Connecting to Care’, began in April 2024, with seven funded projects across Scotland. Delivered in partnership with the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), the Programme has developed models of digital inclusion to support people in accessing digital services and support. To date, it has benefited over 3,500 people supporting them to be digitally included, develop essential digital skills, and improve their wellbeing, and has supported 616 staff and volunteers. We are now developing an agreed approach for its learning and models to be embedded across health and social care services to support inclusion and access to digital services. You can read the impact reports from the Programme online.

Connect Me

The award-winning Connect Me remote monitoring and self-management service supports people at home to take and submit their own readings - reducing travel and inconvenience, and reducing unnecessary appointments. The service is available through 50 per cent of GP practices and to date has supported over 113,000 people, mostly with hypertension, saving an estimated 400,000 unnecessary appointments. We will explore the wider use of Connect Me for additional conditions/pathways and explore with NHS Health Boards and GPs how it can be expanded further across the country.

Digital Mental Health therapies

Digital mental health therapies and wellbeing resources provide additional support to people at a time that suits them – for example if they prefer not to travel, or do not feel they can attend a face to face session. While not intended to replace traditional services, and accepted as not appropriate in certain circumstances, these have proven a useful additional option. There are now a total of 35 digital therapeutic treatments available across all NHS Health Board areas with 74,000 referrals in the past year, including self-referrals; and work is under way to establish digital therapy services in prisons and in higher education.

Shared Alarm Receiving Centre

We have begun the transition from analogue to Digital Telecare for the 142,000 people in receipt of Telecare in Scotland by supporting Telecare service providers and establishing a shared cloud-based Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). The digital service will play a key part in helping unavoidable hospital admissions by supporting more people to access care at home. It will increase resilience in the digital telecare infrastructure and improve access to data, supporting new models of service delivery.

Theatre Scheduling

We successfully deployed a pilot programme for a digital theatre scheduling tool in three NHS Health Boards, that showed an increase in operating theatre productivity by up to 20 per cent for some specialties. The helps optimise the use of available theatre slots and find patients or procedures that best fill gaps, based on waiting list priority. The First Minister announced in January 2025 that the initiative would be rolled out nationally this year.

Digital Dermatology

In partnership with NHS Golden Jubilee’s Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) a new Digital Dermatology service has been developed for receiving, storing and sharing dermatology images between Primary and Secondary Care. This allows more efficient identification of cases that can be expedited for referral and surgery, and reduce the need for outpatient appointments. Announced by the First Minister in January 2025, the new service became available across all NHS Health Boards in April 2025 and is being progressively developed through the remainder of the year.

Digital products and solutions in social care

Work continues in this area, with delivery partners in social care leading on this work. Scottish Care’s work on the role of the Care Technologist, trialled and embedded in several parts of the sector, improves the support made available to people through digital means, including an online resource, case studies, and training resources. The first Care Tech Assembly was held in Glasgow in June 2025. Social Work Scotland has been work to embed Near Me as a communication tool between Justice Social Workers and prisoners, with work ongoing in HMP Stirling and HMP Glenochil. The project is scheduled to roll out across Scotland’s prison estate. Social work departments across 24 local authorities are engaged in the project. Local authorities have also been trialling AI to support social workers in saving time in note-taking and records updating, with all areas of Scotland now having the option to embed AI notes into social work practice.

Deliverables and progress to date

For this year, we have highlighted progress for agreed deliverables as at 1 April 2025, grouped according to the priorities of the Digital Health and Care Strategy. Future iteration of our delivery plans will be reformatted and structured in support of the Service Renewal Framework, the Population Health Framework, and the Operational Improvement Plan.