Written by Technical Team | Last updated 30.09.2025 | 10 minute read
The NHS App has quietly become the digital front door to health services in England, and its public roadmap for 2025 sets out an ambitious next phase. Beyond incremental fixes, the plan signals a shift towards deeper integration with GP and hospital systems, richer self‑service for patients and carers, and a more coherent messaging experience intended to replace costlier channels like SMS. This review explores what’s coming next, why it matters, and how providers and product teams can get ready.
At the top level, the 2025 development focus coalesces around two themes: improving health outcomes by putting people in control of their care, and driving operational efficiency by reducing administrative friction across the system. That combination shapes everything from how test results are visualised to how appointment pathways are routed, and even the tone of notifications people receive. In practical terms, the roadmap prioritises doing the basics better—clearer records, simpler booking, more reliable status updates—while building the plumbing required to create genuinely joined‑up digital journeys.
Two contextual factors make this year’s roadmap different. First, the App is now a mature channel used at scale, so small usability gains can produce outsized benefits. A clearer error message or a more obvious “next step” after a failed booking reduces demand on practice phone lines and helpdesks. Secondly, integration is accelerating. Patient‑facing APIs are standardising access to GP records and appointments, while national services (for vaccinations, organ donation decisions, and contact details) are being surfaced with single sign‑on. The upshot is that the App is no longer just a place to view information—it is becoming a control surface for the system.
For patients, the near‑term impact will be felt in fewer dead ends and less guesswork. Test results presented with trends and plainer language, more consistent appointment flows across care settings, clearer prescription status messages, and a single, tidy inbox all translate into less time searching and more time doing. For carers managing someone else’s care, the extension of proxy features into secondary care will be a meaningful step towards parity with managing your own account.
The most visible changes in 2025 concentrate on the day‑to‑day tasks patients carry out most: booking and tracking appointments, reordering repeat prescriptions, and making sense of their GP record.
On appointments, the roadmap points towards two improvements that should reduce friction across primary and secondary care. The first is a cleaner booking journey within GP services, including better support for online consultation platforms where practices triage demand and offer bookable slots. The second is expanded access to hospital referrals and outpatient appointments, surfaced with consistent design and clearer labels so people can tell at a glance what’s coming up, what changed, and what to do next. Importantly, patient‑initiated follow‑up (PIFU) requests are being enabled from within the App, which should shorten the loop for people on long‑term pathways and reduce avoidable inbound calls.
Repeat prescriptions continue to be an anchor use case, and the App is doubling down on clarity and confidence. Status tracking is being rolled out more widely so that “requested”, “approved”, “ready to collect” and similar states are unambiguous, not inferred. Last issue dates are already visible, which helps people plan ahead and avoid running out. Upcoming work focuses on reminders for repeats, better handling of items that are no longer requestable, and clearer feedback when notes accompany an order. Taken together, these small nudges add up to fewer emergency requests and a steadier flow through pharmacies and GP admin teams.
The health record is becoming easier to interpret without clinical translation. Trend graphs for common tests (such as blood pressure or HbA1c) have been introduced, with ongoing tweaks to show ranges, highlight key values and separate GP‑originated results from hospital data where appropriate. The roadmap sets out more improvements to the layout and content of the GP record so that people can find what they need faster and spot what has changed since last time, including for those who manage health services for others.
While many of these changes are iterative, the strategic thread is unmistakable: make the same actions possible across more of the system, but with fewer variations in how they look and behave. That consistency is what allows the App to be a single destination for routine healthcare tasks.
What to expect next at a glance:
If there is one area poised to reshape how people experience the NHS App, it is messaging. The goal is clear: move as much communication as possible out of letters and SMS into a secure, unified inbox that travels with the user. This is not just a cost‑saving exercise—though reducing SMS spend is part of it—it also sets the stage for richer, action‑oriented messages that link directly to App tasks. Think of a hospital appointment reminder that not only tells you the time, but includes a prominent “change or cancel” link that lands you in the right place instantly.
The App is standardising message management: users can flag or remove messages, filter their inbox, and—crucially—receive reliable push notifications. The roadmap prioritises getting more users opted in to notifications, because a message you never see is a message that might later need to be duplicated as a text or letter. Increased read rates are not just vanity metrics; they determine whether digital by default can genuinely replace the paper trail without compromising safety or equity.
A second thread is the move towards a single, combined inbox spanning messages from GP practices, hospitals, and national services. With many providers already integrating via common notification services, this consolidation reduces the mental load on users who previously had to remember which service sent which message. It also helps care teams: if more patients receive and act on messages promptly, fewer chase calls are required, fewer DNAs occur, and schedules run closer to plan.
There is also a pragmatic bridge for people who have verified their identity with NHS login but do not (yet) use the App day‑to‑day. For them, the system can store messages and use SMS to nudge them that something awaits in their secure inbox, nudging adoption without shutting the door to those who still prefer the web. Over time, as more services adopt the same rails, expect more uniform message templates, clearer calls to action, and fewer confusing duplicates.
A joined‑up service only works if people can find what they need. The App’s navigation is being refreshed so that core services—appointments, prescriptions, messages and records—are both easy to locate and consistent across iOS, Android and the web. That refresh sits on a shared design system, which helps teams reuse patterns like page headers, filters and error pages. The practical outcome is fewer abandoned journeys and less “where do I tap?” frustration.
Alongside navigation changes, the login experience is being streamlined. Support for password managers and passkeys reduces the need for one‑time codes, and clearer error screens give people a way forward instead of a brick wall. Accessibility fixes continue across the board—screen reader order, colour contrast, labels—so that the App passes the “works for everyone” test more reliably. Under the hood, performance and stability work targets shorter load times and fewer crashes, and forward‑compatibility work ensures the App behaves on the latest mobile operating systems.
The roadmap is pragmatic, but its success depends on factors beyond the App team’s direct control. The most obvious is integration readiness across the system. Features like richer appointment booking, prescription status updates and record visualisations rely on timely, standardised data flowing from GP and hospital systems. Where suppliers lag or configurations vary, user experiences will vary too. That is unavoidable in a federated ecosystem, but it can be mitigated by clarity about what is “live where”, and by designing fallbacks that keep users moving even when back‑end services are unavailable.
A second dependency is consent and governance, especially as proxy access extends deeper into secondary care. Carers need to be able to view appointments, documents and results for their loved ones with the same confidence and clarity as if they were managing their own account. That implies robust identity verification, auditable relationships and unambiguous privacy controls that both clinicians and patients trust. In the short term, expect incremental progress: clearer language around whose data you’re viewing, more obvious account switching, and less opportunity for accidental actions on the wrong profile.
Digital exclusion remains a live risk. The mantra “digital by default, not digital only” will be tested as more communications move into the App and push notifications become the norm. Designers can blunt the edge by reducing cognitive load, using plain English, and offering true parity between app and web experiences. But system leaders must still retain alternative channels for those who cannot or will not use the App, and they should monitor read rates and outcomes across demographic groups to catch disparities early.
Finally, change management matters. As navigation, copy and visual patterns evolve, there is a risk of disorientation for existing users and extra training needs for frontline staff who support them. Teams that plan communications, update screenshots and scripts, and sequence rollouts carefully will spare their reception desks a rush of “where has X gone?” calls the week after a release.
Practical preparation for providers, product teams and ICS leaders:
The strategic direction is encouraging: keep simplifying, keep integrating, and keep pulling the system into the same digital doorway. In appointments, that means fewer unique journeys to learn and clearer actions when circumstances change. In prescriptions, it means a tighter loop with pharmacists and a more realistic expectation of when medicine will be available. In records, it means less decoding and more understanding, so that people and clinicians can have better conversations.
What’s coming next is less about a single flagship feature and more about the standardisation and polish that make digital care reliable at scale. If your service piggy‑backs on the NHS App, the best investment you can make this year is in clarity: clean data, clear language and well‑timed messages. Do that, and the App will do the rest.
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