A recent academic paper submitted to the Journal of Royal Society of Medicine proposed a basic architecture of a Self-Driven Healthcare (SDH) online platform that could support individuals in their personal health and wellbeing journey. The portal would allow individuals to record their own self-generated data (e.g., how they feel, blood pressure reading from home monitoring, etc.,) using a phone app, tablet, computer or Bluetooth device and to 'push' these data onto a secure SDH Portal which holds all their health records, including those generated in the wider healthcare system. The SHD portal could then provide personalized feedback and actionable insights (e.g., personalized risk score, artificial intelligence-assisted clinical coaching, nudges, and gamification etc.,) to empower the self-carer with actionable insights they could use to help improve their mental and physical health and wellbeing.

There are many potential barriers that need to be negotiated before attempting to develop a national SDH portal with this functionality, including considerations related to person-centredness, access, data, governance, and how such a portal could be sustainably funded for public and patient benefit, whilst expanding businesses and growth in the SDH arena.

Our proposal for collaborative working with a wide mix of stakeholders will help unlock the potential of the SDH agenda by helping characterize what a future person-centred SDH portal could look like. Rather than focus on a specific technology, platform or product, we want to go about this another way and ask the intended service users (i.e., patients & people across the age groups and from all walks of life) what they would like the portal to look like and what functionality it should have to help them in their individual self-care journey.

We are seeking public funding to engage constructively with a wide mix of stakeholders (including members of the community, ethnic minority groups, technology providers and members of SDH Open Advisory Group on LinkedIn) to:

1\. Identify the salient characteristics of a person-centred SDH Portal

2\. Assess UK readiness to establish a first-in-the-world person-centred SDH Portal by 2030

3\. Develop the business case for SDH Portal agenda in the UK

Clarifying the desirable characteristics of a person-centred SDH Portal with intended users and underserved groups could help governments and health organisations improve health outcomes in people from across the ages and from different walks of life, whilst also controlling costs and addressing priority areas such as EDI, levelling up and Net-Zero.