A new digital version of the NHS Health Check will be piloted in selected areas early next year, the Government has announced.
The Department of Health and Social Care revealed last week that a digital health check will be ‘ready for testing’ in early 2025, and will be available via the NHS App for patients to do ‘at home’.
It will be piloted in Norfolk, Medway and Lambeth, but ‘plans are being put in place’ for a national rollout, which will run alongside the existing face-to-face programme delivered from GP practices, in order to ‘give patients more choice’.
However, GP leaders have said that shifting towards digital checks and away from face-to-face checks done by GPs could have ‘funding implications’ for practices.
Currently, the face-to-face checks – predominantly delivered by GP practices – are aimed at adults in England aged 40 to 74, and practices are usually funded to provide NHS Health Checks by their local authority at a set fee.
‘The service will be available through the NHS App, meaning users can undertake their health check at home and have the results automatically written back into their GP electronic health record, within a few clicks,’ the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
But Doctors’ Association UK GP spokesperson Dr Steve Taylor said that GP practices are ‘best placed’ to carry out the tests, follow up on results and ‘implement any changes necessary’.
He said that a move towards digital checks would have ‘funding implications’ for practices.
Dr Taylor said: ‘The fee for the tests is usually just enough to cover costs but is more than currently being funded for general practice routine and urgent appointments.
‘Any movement away from GP practices providing this service will have funding implications, since the follow-up and management of some results will still need to be done by GP practices, without the benefit of receiving the fee for the health checks.’
Dr Selvaseelan Selvarajah, GP partner and Tower Hamlets LMC member, said that practice income is unlikely to be ‘vastly affected’ by implementing digital health checks.
‘There is a potential to lose income, but if more patients are detected with blood pressure, with diabetes, obesity management, they will get on the relevant pathway at the GP practice anyway,’ he said.
Dr Selvarajah added: ‘We’ve had patients, for example, go to pharmacies to get their blood pressure checked out and then when the blood pressure’s high they come to us and might be added to our hypertension register and that brings an additional income anyway.’
He also stressed that any changes to the health check must be ‘evidence-based and cost effective’, pointing out that the National Screening Committee does not have ‘any evidence for widespread health checks’.
Nottingham GP partner Dr Irfan Malik agreed that rollout of a digital health check is unlikely to make a ‘huge deal of difference in income’, but warned it could have an effect on GP workload. .
He said: ‘It might increase demand afterwards, if they’re doing things like weight checks, blood pressure, diabetes, they may pick up more things that would probably come our way – which is probably a good thing as well.
‘So workload over time may increase as a result of health checks, but the health of the population would be improved.’
As well as this digital trial, the Government also announced that over 130,000 people will be able to access the ‘life-saving’ health check in their workplace ‘for the first time’.
According to DHSC, employers from ‘a range of professions’ will take part in the programme which begins rollout today.
Plans for a digital health check were first announced at the Spring Budget in 2023, following a pilot in Cornwall which aimed to take pressure off GP services.
The previous Government had committed to launching the digital check in spring 2024.
The health check can help to spot the early signs of stroke, kidney disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and dementia, and the new Labour Government said it plans to deliver one million digital NHS Health Checks in the first four years of the rollout.
In January, an observational study using UK Biobank participants suggested that attending an NHS Health Check is associated with a lower risk of both death and several diseases.
Recent analysis of NHS data revealed that three in five people invited for the check in the past year did not take up the offer.
A version of this article was first published by our sister title Pulse.
