Making personalised health work for population health

14 July 2025 to 25 July 2025 is PHG Foundation’s personalised health fortnight. Follow and share the campaign on LinkedIn

Many of us frequently hear and deeply feel that ‘nothing is more important than your health’. This sentiment is, at its core, a personal statement. Your health is yours.

Which brings us to personalised health, a concept that has been with us all along but which has recently been supercharged. We have now reached a point where new technologies offer us unprecedented health information that is specific to us and no one else. If we can measure and use this personalised health information effectively then we can live longer and healthier lives, enjoying our family, friends and more of the many pleasures the world has to offer. 

The concept of personalised health is at the centre of a renewed NHS and its 10 Year Health Plan. Our health system is moving from sickness to prevention, analog to digital and hospital to community. This approach has the potential to empower the individual to rapidly get information about disease risk and management, when they are more able to take action, and to do so locally within their own community. 

Personalised health needs the foundation of technology

Without a foundation of technology, personalised health would be impossible. Electronic health records are essential to having the right information in the right hands at the right time. The NHS App makes this information accessible to the individual anywhere and opens up the lines of communication between the patient and the health system. Biomarker technologies are growing rapidly and genomics, the ultimate personalised information, is helping us to make significant health decisions about cancer, rare disease and complex disease as well. Personal devices, such as smart watches, now enable high resolution data on physical activity and lifestyle as well as select physiology metrics which individuals can use to inform how they themselves can predict, prevent or manage disease. 

Personalised health data is complex data and sophisticated methods, from fields like data science and artificial intelligence, are needed in order to extract meaning. These methods require massive databases coupled with computing power in order to be used, thus safe data sharing and infrastructure are essential. There also needs to be an innovation pathway that results in products that make tangible differences to patients, a pathway which appropriately links the trusted, unconflicted handling and analysis of personal data with commercial interests and potential. Further, as these technologies and pathways are stitched together, it will be imperative that they are not done so in a way that worsens existing health inequalities. 

Indeed, there is a unique opportunity to tackle health inequalities by prioritising historically underserved and underrepresented groups to receive personalised health interventions. Such an approach is likely to maximise the difference to peoples’ lives. Ultimately, this would also more rapidly and fairly improve the UK’s socioeconomic well-being, for example enabling more people to enter/rejoin the workforce, reducing sick leave, and increasing peoples’ income.

If we can empower patients with personalised health, we give our whole population a chance for a step change in their quality of life. This new era holds much promise and the UK is poised to show the world how a country can truly improve health for all.

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