Health and social care - data strategy: 2025 update - progress and priorities

Strategic Context

On 27 January 2025 the First Minister set out a number of key priorities to support the renewal and reform of our health and social care sector, with digital confirmed explicitly as a key component. The announcement confirmed that digital will support us to deliver more preventative models of care by helping to manage demand in the system and enabling insights into new methods and treatments, while improving experiences and outcomes, and helping to address potential inequalities.

The four key areas of focus confirmed by the First Minister are:

• 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

Further details on implementation are set out in the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan, published in March 2025, followed by the Population Health Framework, and the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework published in June 2025.

The NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan set out key commitments including rolling out digital dermatology in all General Practice (GP) services by Spring 2025, the use of the Community Health Index (CHI) within Local Government and launching a health and social care online app by December 2025. The commitment to deliver a health and social care online app and use CHI in Local Government is key to helping us achieve the ambitions of our Data Strategy to provide both professionals and the public with greater access to data.

The Service Renewal Framework further builds on the importance of digital with one of its five principles as “Services which are accessible through digital technologies, with people and our workforce able to access the right information”. In addition to highlighting digital as one of its five principles, it confirms the cross-cutting support role of digital in underpinning and enabling the delivery of the other four principles.

Within the Renewal and Reform agenda, we therefore reiterate the role of digital and data in empowering people, liberating those who deliver health and care, and creating capacity, productivity, and improved insights in the system.