Dermatology patients living in Lanarkshire have begun to use the new national health and social care platform – MyCare.Scot – after the app went live last week.

Patients have begun to be onboarded onto the app after it was rolled out across the NHS Lanarkshire health board region, selected as the test bed area for a system that will start to be made available across Scotland from April next year.

The MyCare app, which allows patients to sign in securely to manage and view their medical appointments, is the initial version of what will become a nationwide application that will allow the public to access their health and social records online for the first time.

Greg Thomson, Digital Front Door Programme Director at NHS Education for Scotland (NES), provided an update yesterday on the programme at the annual DigiFest conference, at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology & Innovation Centre in Glasgow.

“So it wasn’t a big bang overnight, and lots of people flooded to the site,” he said. “People will now be invited to onboard to MyCare.Scot care when they receive their appointment letter. And we have seen people start to do that over the weekend, and at the start of this week.”

He added: “That will be a gradual ramp up but obviously not everyone may choose to pick up that offer just now, it’s a busy time of year, etc, but it allows us to ramp up gradually, and see how people are getting through the onboarding journey, to see what they access, and then start to get feedback.”

The service uses the Scottish Government’s ScotAccount login service, which enables users to securely verify their identity before accessing public services online. Patients in Lanarkshire have been sent appointment letters in the normal way, informing them of the protocol to use the app. In time, it is expected that users will be given the option of receiving future communications via a ‘Digital Mailbox’, also in development by the Scottish Government.

Thomson said the approach is for MyCare to be availed of a series of “repeatable components” rather than trying to build everything from scratch. Much of the technology already exists, and can be integrated into the app’s functionality and scaled up over time. Patients will always be given the option of a non-digital route for communications, should they be unwilling to use an online service.

“It’s trying to make this as simple for the people who are going to interact with it,” he said. “It has good foundations just now, but it needs to really ramp up to support the full population.”

The benefits are expected to be not only confined to citizens, who for the first time will be able to view their appointments and records – such as medications and vaccinations – online. It will also generate savings for the NHS and social care sector.

Alison Ward, Vice President and Programme Director at CGI, the technology partner for the app, said how their experience of working with the Wayfinder service for secondary (hospital) care in England, could generate similar upsides in Scotland.

“What that does is it gives patients access to and a single view of their secondary care, waiting times, referrals and appointments in the NHS app in England,” she said. “And the reason I want to talk about this is, from a technology point of view, is that it’s a new service that didn’t exist previously, but also it’s brought huge benefits to patients and some benefits to staff as well.

“So in 18 months since launch, over 100 trusts in England were connected to the NHS app using Wayfinder, and since the service launched at the end of 2022, 200 million visits have been made to the pages where you can look at your secondary care appointments, referrals and waiting times.”

The system required a large technical integration between multiple patient record providers and patient engagement portals, Ward said, but it achieved a “huge reduction” in the number of patients missing appointments.

According to the figures she shared, it helped prevent 1.9 million did-not-attends (DNAs) in the 2024/25 financial year, generating a saving of £226 million. And by being able to send patients push notifications through the NHS App, or SMS or email, trusts in England have also been able to a forecasted £7 million per year from not having to send letters through the post.

“Whilst those savings aren’t huge, the important lesson from that is that you don’t necessarily need to stop sending patients letters,” she said. “If you can use other digital channels and you can get patients to come to the appointments that have been arranged for them, you can still send them a letter.”

Thomson said also the benefits of digital mailbox communications are that if you misplace a letter, you at least have a go-to place online to find the details of your appointment.

Whilst the MyCare.Scot app is finding its way incrementally, the Scottish Government is planning to reveal a roadmap document in March next year – which will provide more detail of the long-term goals for the app, and expected timelines of when new services will be added. There will be a service finder integrated in the app, said Thomson, which will help signpost services locally, particularly for people with conditions who may benefit from community support groups.

It is also envisaged that a version of the app will eventually be available on the various app stores. At the moment, MyCare is web-based, and with full app functionality, that will allow users to receive push notifications, which are more cost-effective than email, or text/SMS communications.

The possibilities are “endless”, Thomson stressed, but there is also an acute need to “prioritise” the most important aspects of digital delivery that will bring about the biggest and most important early impacts.

Lara Sampson, a partner with Public Digital, provided a clear-eyed analysis of where large-scale public sector transformation projects often fail, and the importance of being outcomes focused rather than on technical delivery.

Sampson, who worked on the rollout of the Universal Credit benefits system for the Department of Work & Pensions, said the programme started out with ‘extraordinary ambitions’ but was described in Parliament in 2013 as ‘extraordinarily poor’, and after £400 million spent, it didn’t have a single user.

She warned that treating major IT delivery programmes in a technocratic way, and over-specifying a list of requirements upfront means you be doing so when you know the “absolute least” about the people you are trying to serve.

She gave an example where they chose a postcode area from London to test the rollout of UC but when they moved to a neighbouring area, they quickly realised their basic assumptions about different demographics and people’s behaviours had been wrong.

Sampson said it’s not so much as saying we need to be ‘outcomes focused’, because no one ever said ‘we don’t want to be outcomes focused’. It’s about realising that ‘staying the course’ and remaining relentlessly outcomes-focused is “really difficult”.

“Embracing the starting small, testing, learning..because the more places you go to, the more you will learn stuff,” she added. “The plan is the plan until we learn something new or something changes. And so really putting that front and centre, it gives you a lot of license to adjust and pivot as you learn.”

Digital Care Collaborative

Other developments during DigiFest yesterday, included the launch of the new Digital Care Collaborative, spearheaded by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre. The collaborative is intended to support innovation within the social care sector, bringing together an ecosystem of partner organisations and individuals with an interest in social care to share knowledge, expertise and experience in social care innovation.

Professor George Crooks, CEO of DHI, said that there are already two similar clusters for mental health and healthy ageing, and DHI is committed in its strategy to doing the same for social care.

“We’re in conversation with government colleagues about how we make sure that this community of interest is coming together and can support the strategic priorities in Scotland going forward. So it’s a great opportunity.”

For more information visit: https://www.dhi-scotland.com/innovation-clusters/dccs