Healthcare conferences in London, Toronto, and Chicago may be oceans apart—but the pain points echo loud and clear: workforce shortages, AI uncertainty, and digital bottlenecks. At the King’s Fund Digital Health Transformation event, the only difference was the accent…and the involvement of patients.
The NHS Puts Patients in the Planning Room
It was a pleasant surprise to see how central patient voices were to the agenda. At every panel I attended, a patient joined not just to share their story, but to walk through the work they were leading inside the NHS.
Robyn Chappell, a Lived Experience Manager at National Voices – a leading coalition of health and social care charities in England – spoke about their work with the NHS and other health stakeholders on designing new workflows with patient safety + comfort in mind.
That was one of my takeaways from the conference – the NHS is several steps ahead of us in Canada and the US at co-designing with patients. They have many initiatives where people with lived experience (patients, service users, caregivers, and families) are an integral part of the team.
Suvera Built for Engagement
At the conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. William Gao, co-founder of Suvera. His team is building a platform to proactively help patients with chronic conditions. The results have been impressive: reduced blood pressure, fewer hospitalizations, and strong patient engagement.
Their platform is also built with equity in mind.
In northeast London, where many patients speak limited English, Suvera rewrote materials at a grade three reading level and embedded real-time translation into every call. As Dr. Gao put it, “For many, knowledge of the English language is very basic – a reading age of nine. We had to make sure that if we call the patient, there is a language translator available. It’s not that patients don’t want to engage, it’s that they’re not giving the access to enable them to engage.”
Same Problems, So Why Not Share Solutions?
It was also striking how familiar the challenges sounded: workforce shortages, rural access gaps, interoperability headaches. Different system, same story. The parallels made me wonder why Canada, the US, and the UK don’t collaborate more often. There’s clearly more we could be learning from each other.
Personal note: I have always wanted to attend a King’s Fund event. I learned about their events years ago through a friend and it has always been a professional goal of mine to be at one. So when the stars aligned, I jumped at the chance. Shout out to my wife who kindly let me cheat on our European vacation for a day to attend the conference.
