Remote Patient Monitoring in the NHS: From Promise to Practice

Professor Sabine Van Der Veer, Professor of Health Informatics in the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences at The University of Manchester and co-lead of the Remote Monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis (REMORA) programme, was the Chair of the event and provided an introduction to Digital Futures and informed the attendees about the GM Connected Health Ecosystem and its events each academic year.

Following the introductions, Wajid Hussain, Chief Medical Information Officer at NHS England, provided a talk on the first theme of the event: Policy. Wajid discussed the strategic frame, with three shifts in the 10 Year Health Plan; hospital to community​, analogue to digital​, and lastly, sickness to prevention​. Wajid also highlighted new movements for the NHS, which included 45 NHS App pilots being announced in November 2025 (which are expected to free up around 500,000 appointments per year), funding-wise an additional £29 billion real-terms day-to-day uplift for the NHS by 2028/29, and up to £10 billion of this funding cost for digital and technology (which is around a 50% rise in its technology spend).

Next up to present were Karen Staniland, a person with lived experience of RA, and Charlotte Sharp, Consultant Rheumatologist at MFT. Karen spoke on the remote electronic monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis (REMORA2) study, which is developing, testing and evaluating a system for tracking daily symptoms of people living with RA (where data is collected using a smartphone app and integrated into NHS electronic records). Charlotte's talk, Clinician perspectives on remote monitoring​, covered innovative service models, the need to safeguard important elective work, inclusion, people, and research.

David Walliker, Chief Digital & Information Office at MFT, presented next as the Healthcare provider perspective, discussing the need to close the gap between pilot initiatives and sustainable, system-wide remote monitoring. David proposed that closing the gap would require addressing challenges across care pathways, technology, governance, and data integration. Moreover, David placed emphasis on strong governance frameworks being essential to define responsibilities, ensure patient safety, and uphold duty of care as remote monitoring expands.

Caroline Cake, CEO at Kneu Health, spoke on the Technology provider ​perspective next. Caroline presented statistics, of which neurology ​care today has seen $400B per year​ spent on chronic neurology conditions and that 25% acute care beds are occupied by patients with chronic neurology conditions.

Lastly, Stephanie Stockwell of RAND Europe presented the Academia ​perspective. Stephanie discussed the implications for evidence generation in the NHS​, which included evidence needing to be extended beyond narrow activity metrics and that evidence generation approaches need to match the pace and complexity of digital innovation itself.