How the Care Group boosted digital access across North East London

The Care Group has helped more residents across North East London access NHS services digitally through a long-running programme from 2021 to 2025. 

We delivered a range of digital projects, commissioned by North East London Integrated Care Board (ICB), as part of the NHS Digital First programme. Here, we review the impact of our work, which we call our Digital Accelerator project, in bringing digital services to residents and NHS staff.

Impact 

Across 2021-2025 our Digital Accelerator project:

• Supported over 200 practices across North East London
• Contributed to tripling the number of NHS App logins to reach 1.2 million monthly logins by November 2024
• Increased NHS App registrations by 64%
• Increased repeat prescriptions ordered digitally by 49%, from March 2024 to January 2025
• Delivered over 1,000 hours of training to support NHS staff use new digital services
• 367,000 North East London patients registered for their GP through a portal we provided
• Developed a comprehensive programme to manage demand and capacity with partners in City and Hackney.

Dr Osman Bhatti, Tower Hamlets GP and Chief Clinical Information Officer at the ICB, said: “As North East London came together to implement digital transformation across primary care, we needed to have a supportive and reliable team to truly implement change.

“The Digital Accelerator team have achieved so much over the years that North East London’s primary care footprint has moved leaps and bounds ahead of what we aimed for, and the willingness of the team to go over and beyond has left a legacy that will be missed going forward. Primary care has truly benefited and transformed with the Digital Accelerator programme – thank you.”

Sabba Hussain, Head of IT, AI and Digital Transformation at the Care Group, said: “We were delighted to be able to work collaboratively with practices across North East London to help them become digitally enabled. This has been shown not only to help staff work more effectively – it has simplified access to the NHS to many residents as well.”