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The health and social care sector is struggling to come to terms with increasing demand due to demographic and other changes and decreasing growth in funding. The arrival of new technologies offers opportunities to transform services so that they are better able to cope with these pressures. Furthermore, providers and commissioners of care are looking for ways of using digital technology to plan services better, provide more informed care at the point of delivery and keep records more secure.

There is a widely held belief that the health and social care system struggles to manage change involving digital technology. This belief is driven by events such as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), a£ 10 billion-plus investment in digitising the records of every patient in the NHS, which ended up achieving a fraction of the original vision; the impact of the WannaCry cyber-attack on NHS services in May 2017; or the age of much of the software or hardware being used across England, for example. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, has emphasised that any ten-year plan will require the NHS to become ‘massively more teched up’(Lintern 2018). However, numerous trusts and care providers around the country are already progressing towards more digitised care and record-keeping, both technically advanced organisations that form part of the Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme and organisations outside of it.