For NHS Trusts, Specialty Teams, and Secondary Care Leaders
Health-Shared helps secondary care organisations build condition-specific patient communities that improve preparation, activation, recovery, and follow-through across the treatment journey.
Designed for specialty services, perioperative pathways, outpatient cohorts, and long-term treatment journeys. Works alongside your existing clinical pathways, outpatient models, and patient communications.
This short video explains the Health-Shared model: how communities of practice, AI-supported discovery, and peer learning can help secondary care services support activation at scale.
From lived experience to shared learning, ongoing engagement, and better follow-through — without adding another disconnected digital layer.
Most secondary care services already have large groups of people they know well. But most services still interact with those cohorts mainly through appointments, letters, scheduling, and gatekeeping processes.
That means the relationship stays transactional when it could become transformational.
This fits NHS England’s direction of travel on personalised, digital elective reform and on health optimisation before surgery.
Health-Shared is built for that gap.
Cohorts already in your service
People waiting for procedures
People preparing for surgery
People moving through rehab or recovery
People managing chronic or recurrent specialty conditions
People who need better follow-through after intervention
People who could avoid deterioration with better activation earlier
Moving from controlling the pathway to activating the people in the pathway is the shift that matters.
The better prepared a patient is before a procedure, the better the chances of smoother recovery and better outcomes. NHS England's perioperative guidance explicitly links surgery dates to patients being fit or ready from a health point of view, and recent NHS and Macmillan prehabilitation materials point to fewer complications, shorter stays, and fewer A&E admissions when prehab is done well.
Better activation and self-management after treatment can improve confidence, quality of life, and follow-through. NHS England's supported self-management evidence says patient activation is associated with lower use of some healthcare services, and its intermediate care framework links better rehabilitation and discharge support with reduced avoidable readmissions and improved independence.
Health-Shared helps specialty teams create structured digital communities where patients can:
Instead of relying only on one-way letters, pre-op leaflets, discharge packs, or scattered messaging, you create an ongoing activation environment around the condition or pathway.
Surface real barriers, questions, and needs from patients across the pathway — at scale.
Structured pathways make participation easier for patients from their first interaction.
Patients learn from others at similar stages, building a living resource of practical knowledge.
Gain clearer insight into what people are struggling with across the pathway, enabling more targeted support at each stage.
Encourages consistent engagement and contribution without clinical distraction.
Stronger continuity between preparation, treatment, and recovery — keeping patients engaged throughout.
This is not social media noise. It is a structured, specialty-relevant community model informed by published work on communities of practice, patient engagement, and digital self-management support.
Want the broader product view? See how Health-Shared works as community infrastructure.
Already being implemented in secondary care
A fit-for-surgery community model can help bring together patients at different points before a procedure so they can build understanding, confidence, and readiness — while the service gains a better activation layer around preparation.
A varicose veins community model can help support patients across education, decision-making, consent understanding, expectations, recovery, and longer-term self-management.
These are examples of how a service can build around a real specialty cohort it already knows, rather than trying to create engagement from scratch.
Health-Shared can begin as a focused pilot around a defined pathway or cohort — making it easier to test, learn, and build an internal case for scale.
Pilot-ready: Start with one specialty group and one operational objective.
Pathway-relevant: Build around real patients at real stages of treatment.
Scalable: Prove the model in one service, then expand.
Examples:
Health-Shared’s model for patient activation and community-led support is gaining support from leaders across public health and healthcare delivery.
Prof Azeem Majeed
Professor of Primary Care and Public Health
“Health-Shared empowers individuals with the tools for sustainable self-care while providing verifiable insights for funders and policymakers. In an era of rising chronic disease burdens, it represents a scalable, equitable model to foster genuine behavioural change and reduce healthcare inequities and had the potential to promote public health globally.”
Dr Sandra Appiah
Health-Shared Africa Advisor
“Empowering lived experience to lead and teach is a bold step toward inclusive, sustainable healthcare.”
Including leaders connected to PHAST and WeLReN.
Health-Shared is grounded in published work on communities of practice, patient engagement, community engagement, and digital self-management support.
Health-Shared evidence
Vascular nurse specialists and consultant vascular surgeons rated the Health-Shared.com virtual community of practice platform as usable and acceptable, with strong potential to support patient activation, self-management, the patient journey, consent, and improved patient-provider engagement.
Kashora et al. — Investigating usability and acceptability of a virtual community of practice to promote self-management of chronic vascular conditionsSystematic review
A recent systematic review found that communities of practice in healthcare are often aimed at directly improving clinical outcomes, and among studies showing statistically significant effects, five improved hospital-based services such as discharge planning or rehabilitation, while others improved direct clinical outcomes.
Noar et al. — The aims and effectiveness of communities of practice in healthcare: A systematic reviewSystematic review
Patient engagement can inform education, tools, planning, and policy, but can also enhance service delivery and governance. Higher-level engagement was more often associated with care-process and structural outcomes than lower-level consultation alone.
Bombard et al. — Engaging patients to improve quality of care: a systematic reviewSystematic review
A growing body of literature indicates that engaging patients can lead to improved effectiveness, efficiency, quality of care, health outcomes, and cost-effective health service utilisation.
Bombard et al. — Patient engagement, quality of care, and utilisation outcomesSystematic review
Most included studies positively affected health behaviours, service access, health literacy, public-health planning, and health outcomes, especially where real power-sharing and collaborative partnership were present.
Cyril et al. — Exploring the role of community engagement in improving the health of disadvantaged populationsSystematic review
Solid evidence that community engagement interventions positively affect health behaviours, health consequences, self-efficacy, and perceived social support outcomes across a wide range of contexts.
O'Mara-Eves et al. — Community engagement to reduce inequalities in healthWe can share a fuller reading list during the demo or in the Secondary Care Pilot Brief.
Start with a clearly defined specialty group where activation matters.
Begin with an initial patient group rather than trying to move the whole service at once.
Capture what patients are actually struggling with, what they wish they had known earlier, and what support they value.
Those themes become onboarding, prompts, shared learning, and pathway-relevant community activity.
Patients get more support before, during, and after treatment. The service gains better visibility into pathway barriers and more effective cohort engagement.
Health-Shared does not ask you to replace your EPR, letters, outpatient systems, scheduling tools, or clinical pathways. It sits around them.
That means your service can continue using the systems it already relies on while adding a community layer that supports what those systems do not easily create on their own: belonging, peer learning, shared experience, confidence, and sustained activation.
Supports across
Elective care
Perioperative optimisation
Prehabilitation
Outpatient pathway redesign
Recovery and rehab
Supported self-management
Specialty cohort engagement
A practical way to improve preparation, understanding, and follow-through across a real patient cohort.
A better activation layer around pathways that can support productivity, readiness, and reduced avoidable demand.
More confidence, more relevance, more support from others at similar stages, and better quality of life through stronger self-management.
A stronger chance of reducing unnecessary healthcare resource utilisation by helping people act earlier, prepare better, and recover more effectively.
No. Health-Shared is a structured patient community and activation layer, not just a passive information resource. It is designed around peer learning, discovery, and practical follow-through across the treatment journey.
No. It is designed to complement existing systems, not replace them. Your service continues using the EPR, letters, scheduling, and clinical pathways it already relies on.
Yes. That is one of the strongest secondary care use cases.
Yes. It is relevant for any secondary care cohort where activation, self-management, and follow-through matter — including long-term outpatient cohorts, recurrent condition populations, and post-treatment self-management groups.
Yes. The model is designed to begin with one specialty cohort or one pathway and then scale. Starting focused makes it easier to test, learn, and build an internal case.
Secondary care already has trusted relationships with large groups of condition-specific patients. The next step is not just to manage those pathways more tightly. It is to help people become more active within them. Health-Shared helps secondary care organisations build communities that support activation, better preparation, stronger recovery, and practical follow-through.
See how Health-Shared can help your trust or specialty service build a condition-specific activation layer around the cohorts you already serve.
What to expect
Prefer to email directly? info@health-shared.com
Download the Secondary Care Pilot BriefExploring Health-Shared for another audience?
