Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a £725,000 contract for a new patient-focused intranet and internet solution to Made Purple Limited. The trust has described the investment as a direct response to digital deprivation among its patient population.

The system is designed to give patients access to digital tools while they are in contact with trust services. Through it, patients will be able to develop basic digital skills, research their medical conditions and treatment options, and find information about the trust itself, including its most recent Care Quality Commission inspection reports. The trust has positioned the contract as a patient experience investment, arguing that equipping people with digital capability supports them more effectively through their care.

That framing matters. A significant proportion of NHS digital investment is directed at clinical infrastructure: electronic patient records, diagnostic systems, and data platforms that improve how staff work. Spending on patients' own digital access is less common, and tends to receive less attention. Nottinghamshire's decision to spend at this level on a patient-facing solution reflects a judgement that deprivation is itself a clinical problem, one that affects whether people can engage with their own healthcare at all.

The local policy context reinforces that judgement. Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board has published a Digital Inclusion Delivery Framework covering the period to 2030. The framework treats digital exclusion as a multi-dimensional problem. It covers connectivity and device access, but also digital accessibility, information literacy, and the workforce skills needed to support patients who struggle with digital tools. On accessibility specifically, the framework commits to improving how health information reaches people who face barriers related to language or visual impairment, and to reducing the number of separate digital applications patients are expected to navigate for health and care purposes. Fragmentation of digital services is increasingly recognised as a barrier in its own right, particularly for older patients or those with lower digital confidence.

The Nottinghamshire contract is small by the standards of current NHS technology spending. NHS England recently awarded a contract worth up to £160 million to IBM as a strategic delivery partner for the NHS App, covering the period from May 2026 to March 2028. The app serves as a central point of access to NHS services for millions of patients, and the scale of that investment reflects its national reach. NHS England has also signalled upcoming procurement activity including a two-year DevOps contract valued at £19 million to support digital delivery across NHS directorates.

At trust level, the figures are also substantial. Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has signed a ten-year electronic patient record contract with Epic worth £52 million, after spending years operating a system that left roughly a fifth of its clinical applications unintegrated. The Nottinghamshire contract, at £725,000, sits in a different category entirely. But the comparison is not straightforward. Electronic patient record systems and NHS App infrastructure serve very different purposes from a tool designed to help an individual patient understand their diagnosis or locate a CQC report. The value of the latter is harder to quantify and easier to overlook in procurement discussions dominated by large-scale system replacements.

What the Nottinghamshire contract does, at minimum, is acknowledge that digital health investment has two sides. One side concerns what clinicians and administrators can do with better systems. The other concerns whether patients can participate meaningfully in their own care in an environment that increasingly assumes digital competence. The NHS has invested heavily in the former. Investment in the latter has been patchier, and it tends to reflect the priorities of individual trusts rather than any national programme.

Whether £725,000 is sufficient to make a material difference to digital deprivation across Nottinghamshire's patient population is an open question. The contract signals intent. The results will depend on how the solution is implemented and whether patients in the trust's most deprived communities are actually reached by it.

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