Yesterday’s fiscal exercise includes an extra injection of funding for health tech, with a particular focus on enabling the NHS’s smartphone program to be the default front door for services

The Budget has provided hundreds of millions of pounds of additional investment in NHS technology, including money to help ensure the NHS App becomes the “single user-facing service” through which most patients initially engage with the health service.

The Spending Review earlier this year set out a commitment of £10bn to be spent on NHS tech over the coming years. Yesterday’s budget provides £300m on top of this, with the extra cash intended to enable additional “investment for NHS technology to support NHS productivity and improve patient outcomes”.

A key ambition for this investment will be to “ensure seamless navigation and communication between primary and secondary care through the NHS App”, according to the text of the Budget red book.

The latest figures indicate that the app has 38.5 million registered users, with an average of 56.5 million logins recorded each month. At the start of this year, the government said that a “revolutionised” version of the NHS App would be a key part of its plan to slash waiting times for operations and other elective treatments.

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The importance of the smartphone system was reinforced by the Budget, which describes an ambition for the tool to be the front door for patients seeking various kinds of NHS care – or, potentially, information on how to address health issues themselves.

“By guiding patients to self-care, primary care and urgent care through a single user-facing service, their information will be made readily available across all providers,” the red book says. “This [£300m] funding will also close the gap in patient access to digital health records, so patients can make informed choices about their care.”

Using tech systems to help citizens to manage their own health is part of a wider ambition “support a more preventative and sustainable NHS”, according to the Budget,

This objective will also be supported by the creation of 250 new ‘Neighbourhood Health Centres’ throughout England, the Red Book reveals. Almost half of these will be up and running by 2030, with some of the earliest facilities planned for Birmingham, Barrow-in-Furness, Truro, and Southall. These sites – which will use a model of “co-locating local health services such as GPs and physiotherapists to improve access to care” – will build on similar existing centres currently operational in Hull and Barnsley.