Remote and virtual healthcare in the NHS: Where we are, what’s working, and what industry can do

In July 2025, the UK government published its 10-year health plan for England, ‘Fit for the Future’. The plan sets out a structural ambition that the NHS has been moving towards for some time: shift care from hospitals to communities, from analogue to digital, and from treating sickness to preventing it. Remote and virtual healthcare sits at the heart of that ambition, and for pharmaceutical, medtech and life sciences organisations, it changes who delivers care, where it is delivered, and how industry engages with the health service.

What the plan commits to

The NHS 10-year plan describes a care hierarchy with a clear order of preference: care should happen locally, digitally by default, in a patient’s home if possible, in a neighbourhood health centre when needed, and in a hospital if necessary. The neighbourhood health service, the plan’s central organising concept, reshapes how pharma, medtech and life sciences companies need to think about where clinical decisions are made and who makes them.

Virtual wards are central to the delivery of this shift. Five years ago, there were none operating in England. By March 2025, there were 20 virtual ward beds per 100,000 GP-registered patients across the country, and every integrated care system has provision in place. More than 9,000 people now receive hospital-level care at home daily through these services. The NHS 10-year plan commits to further expansion over the next three years, with a new ‘Virtual Wards and Hospital at Home’ procurement framework being introduced through NHS Shared Business Services in 2026.

The NHS App is to become the digital front door to the health service by 2028, enabling remote consultations, prescription management, test booking and access to personal health records. A single patient record will consolidate an individual’s health data across settings, ending the fragmentation that has frustrated both clinicians and patients. Two-thirds of outpatient appointments, currently costing £14 billion annually, are planned to shift to digital alternatives. NHS Online, a new ‘online hospital’ without a physical site, will connect patients to specialist clinicians anywhere in England from 2027. New AI tools are already being tested on the Federated Data Platform, which connects information across healthcare settings, with early evidence suggesting they can reduce administrative time by 51.7% and allow each doctor to treat 13.4% more patients per shift.

NHS organisations will also be required to invest at least 3% of annual spend on service transformation, signalling that the digital and remote care agenda is to be funded from within existing resource envelopes, not as additional investment.

What the evidence says about virtual wards and remote monitoring

NIHR research presented in March 2025 confirmed that virtual wards and hospital at home services can improve clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction, prevent admissions and reduce the length of hospital stays. An estimated one in five emergency hospital admissions is avoidable, and discharge delays peaked at more than 14,000 people per day in January 2024. A 2022 Health Foundation projection suggested England could need between 23,000 and 39,000 additional hospital beds by 2030/31 based on current trends; remote patient monitoring and virtual ward provision represent one of the more tractable responses to that pressure.

Patients who receive hospital-at-home care tend to experience fewer hospital-acquired infections and higher satisfaction scores, and in many cases recover faster. The NHS England virtual wards operational framework confirms that the model has broad clinical support, including endorsement from professional bodies, and that when core components are delivered at scale for appropriate patients, outcomes compare favourably with inpatient care.

For those with limited digital access, for older patients, and for those in areas with poor connectivity, the shift to digital-by-default carries real equity risks. The Health Innovation Network has noted that nearly one in four people still faces barriers to digital access. The NHS 10-Year Plan acknowledges this, committing to contribute to the government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan, but maintaining non-digital access routes will be just as important as building the digital infrastructure itself.

The workforce and skills dimension

Expanding remote and virtual healthcare requires a workforce equipped to deliver care differently, not just the right technology. Clinicians need training in remote monitoring tools and in the clinical governance of virtual wards. Community nurses and health visitors need digital infrastructure and devices that work reliably in home settings. Administrative and coordination functions need to be redesigned around new care pathways.

The NHS 10-Year Plan sets out support for clinicians through AI tools that reduce administrative burden and digital assistants for diagnostics. What it does not fully address is the social care workforce and community teams that will be expected to support tech-enabled care without the same level of investment in tools or training. This is a gap that will need careful management as implementation proceeds, and one that NHS–Industry Partnerships could help to bridge.

For life sciences companies, the changing workforce also matters for how industry engages with the NHS. As care moves into community settings, delivered increasingly through remote channels, the traditional model of engagement with hospital-based clinicians becomes incomplete. Market access strategies, health economics arguments, and commercial team activity need to account for the growing influence of primary care networks, neighbourhood health centres and ICBs.

Opportunities for pharma, medtech and life sciences partners

The NHS digital transformation and remote healthcare agenda creates genuine commercial and partnership opportunities across the life sciences sector. The plan’s expansion of NICE’s technology appraisal system to cover medical devices, diagnostics and digital products, alongside new value-based procurement guidelines from 2026, opens routes to market that are better aligned with demonstrating outcomes and system efficiency than previous frameworks.

Remote patient monitoring generates continuous data. For companies with therapies in long-term conditions, this creates new possibilities for demonstrating real-world effectiveness, supporting treatment adherence, and identifying patients who are not responding as expected. The Health Data Research Service, funded with £600 million from the UK government and the Wellcome Trust, will provide a centralised anonymised dataset for research that could reshape how clinical evidence is generated and used to support market access.

Patient support programmes and nurse-led services, traditionally delivered in secondary care or in-person settings, can increasingly be structured around remote delivery. The economics are attractive: reach can be extended, geography becomes less constraining, and the infrastructure required to support a patient population at scale becomes more efficient. For medtech companies, the 2026 NHS Shared Business Services Virtual Wards framework represents a material procurement opportunity, particularly for providers of remote monitoring platforms that can demonstrate interoperability with NHS digital infrastructure.

NHS–Industry Partnerships that are well-designed and clinically credible have a specific role to play in this transition. CHASE has been facilitating these partnerships for a number of years, and we have seen that the models most likely to succeed in an integrated care environment are those built around real patient pathways, genuine clinical need, and the kind of operational understanding of the NHS that cannot be replaced by a technology platform alone. We published our analysis of the NHS digital transformation agenda and its implications for life sciences in 2025, which is worth reading alongside this piece.

The implementation gap

The NHS 10-Year Plan is an ambitious document. Both the Health Foundation and the BMJ Commission on the Future of the NHS have welcomed its direction while raising questions about delivery. The funding committed is real, but the most important changes require not just investment but sustained organisational reform, workflow redesign and political will over a decade.

The NHS has a well-documented history of technology pilots that do not scale. The single patient record, for all its promise, requires interoperability between systems that are still fragmented across many trusts. The neighbourhood health service model requires new physical infrastructure, workforce redeployment and changes to how GPs are contracted. The timeline is ten years, and the commitments for 2025 and 2026 are more concrete than those for 2030 and beyond.

What is clear is that remote and virtual healthcare in the NHS is a structural change, not a temporary trend. Pharma, medtech and life sciences organisations that engage with it now, through patient programmes, NHS–Industry Partnerships or procurement, will build the evidence base and the NHS relationships that longer-term market access depends on.

If you are planning a patient programme, a commercial model or an NHS–Industry Partnership that needs to operate within the emerging framework of remote NHS care, get in touch with the CHASE team, we’d love to talk.

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