From treatment to prevention: Supporting Scotland’s public health ambitions

For OneAdvanced, this creates an important responsibility

Our role should not be limited to supplying individual systems.

We want to work as a long-term partner to NHS Scotland, helping translate public health ambition into practical, sustainable change that reduces pressure on services and supports better outcomes for communities. 

Cardiovascular disease provides a useful example of this thinking

More than 844,000 people in Scotland have a recorded diagnosis of hypertension, representing 14.4% of the registered population (Public Health Scotland). 

Hypertension is common, measurable and responsive to established interventions, making it a credible starting point for a broader shift towards prevention. 

The opportunity is not simply to create another register or dashboard. It is to help health and care teams identify risk earlier, support patients before their condition deteriorates and reduce avoidable demand on primary, urgent and secondary care. 

In practice, this could mean bringing together information already held across the system: blood pressure readings, overdue reviews, medication changes, hospital correspondence and patient-submitted information.

Connected effectively, these signals could help identify people whose risk is increasing and prompt the right action sooner. 

This is where OneAdvanced could increasingly support a joined-up pathway

A modernised GP Clinical System can provide the longitudinal clinical record. GP Document Workflow (Docman) can help capture relevant information from incoming documents. Outcomes Manager can support population segmentation and targeted case finding. GP Digital Front Door (Patchs) can help engage patients, collect missing information and provide education, reminders and access to appropriate services. 

The long-term opportunity is to connect these capabilities around clearly defined public health outcomes. 

That could include identifying people with undiagnosed or poorly controlled hypertension, supporting medicines optimisation, improving follow-up after discharge and targeting interventions and education towards communities experiencing the greatest inequalities. 

Prevention cannot rely solely on clinicians recalling patients for periodic reviews. People need accessible information, practical support and repeated opportunities to understand and manage their own risk.

Digital tools can help deliver tailored education on areas such as blood pressure, medication adherence, diet, physical activity and smoking cessation, while still providing alternative routes for people who cannot or do not wish to engage digitally. 

Used well, this approach could begin to move the dial from episodic treatment towards continuous prevention

It could also reduce burden.

Better targeting can help teams focus scarce clinical time on patients who most need intervention. Automated collection and structured use of information can reduce manual searches and administrative follow-up.

Earlier action may, over time, help avoid strokes, heart attacks, emergency admissions and more complex care needs. 

This is not something a technology company can design in isolation

For OneAdvanced, being a long-term partner means helping to build that model collaboratively – combining technology, evidence and frontline insight to reduce pressure on NHS services and make education, prevention and earlier intervention part of everyday care. 

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