Health Shared LogoHealth Shared

For NHS Trusts, Specialty Teams, and Secondary Care Leaders

Don’t just manage the pathway. Activate the cohort.

Health-Shared helps secondary care organisations build condition-specific patient communities that improve preparation, activation, recovery, and follow-through across the treatment journey.

Book a Secondary Care DemoDownload the Secondary Care Pilot BriefWatch the 90-second overview

Designed for specialty services, perioperative pathways, outpatient cohorts, and long-term treatment journeys. Works alongside your existing clinical pathways, outpatient models, and patient communications.

Health-Shared secondary care community overview
  • Not another patient portal
  • Not just passive information
  • A digital community layer for condition-specific activation
  • Built for secondary care pathways
  • Supports preparation, recovery, and self-management

See how Health-Shared turns specialty cohorts into active patient communities

This short video explains the Health-Shared model: how communities of practice, AI-supported discovery, and peer learning can help secondary care services support patient activation at scale.

From lived experience to practical support, better preparation, and stronger follow-through — without adding another disconnected layer.

Secondary care has an activation opportunity hiding inside the cohorts it already serves

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.

Why this matters operationally in secondary care

Better readiness and better outcomes

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.

Health-Shared supports this by creating a condition-specific community where people can learn, prepare, and engage earlier — not just receive isolated instructions.

Better recovery and lower repeat demand

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 supports this by helping people stay connected, informed, and active after intervention — reducing the chance that recovery becomes disengagement or repeat avoidable demand.

Health-Shared gives secondary care services a condition-specific activation layer

Health-Shared helps specialty teams create structured digital communities where patients can:

  • Prepare better before treatment
  • Learn from people at similar stages
  • Understand what to expect
  • Build confidence through peer support
  • Stay engaged after intervention
  • Contribute practical experience that helps others

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.

  • AI-assisted discovery interviews

    Surface real barriers, questions, and needs from patients across the pathway — at scale.

  • Guided prompts and onboarding

    Structured pathways make participation easier for patients from their first interaction.

  • Peer learning and shared lived experience

    Patients learn from others at similar stages, building a living resource of practical knowledge.

  • Clearer understanding of patient needs

    Gain clearer insight into what people are struggling with across the pathway, enabling more targeted support at each stage.

  • Light incentives and recognition

    Encourages consistent engagement and contribution without clinical distraction.

  • Stronger continuity across the journey

    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

Examples of the model in secondary care

West Middlesex Fit for Surgery Community

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.

Imperial College Varicose Veins Community

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.

Start with one specialty cohort, not an organisation-wide rollout

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.

Examples

  • Prehab / fit for surgery cohorts
  • Vascular patient communities
  • Rehab and recovery pathways
  • Long-term outpatient cohorts
  • Recurrent condition populations
  • Procedure-specific education and support cohorts
  • Post-treatment self-management groups

  • 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.

Ask about a pilot

Supported by leaders across primary care, public health, and patient activation

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

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

Dr Sandra Appiah

Health-Shared Africa Advisor

“Empowering lived experience to lead and teach is a bold step toward inclusive, sustainable healthcare.”
PHAST

Supported by public health and primary care voices

Including leaders connected to PHAST and WeLReN.

Research and evidence underpinning the model

Health-Shared is grounded in published work on communities of practice, patient engagement, community engagement, and digital self-management support.

Health-Shared evidence

Virtual communities of practice and secondary care self-management

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 conditions

We can share a fuller reading list during the demo or in the Secondary Care Pilot Brief.

How a Health-Shared specialty community starts

  1. Choose one cohort or pathway

    Start with a clearly defined specialty group where activation matters.

  2. Launch a core community

    Begin with an initial patient group rather than trying to move the whole service at once.

  3. Run AI-supported discovery

    Capture what patients are actually struggling with, what they wish they had known earlier, and what support they value.

  4. Turn insight into structured participation

    Those themes become onboarding, prompts, shared learning, and pathway-relevant community activity.

  5. Build activation across the journey

    Patients get more support before, during, and after treatment. The service gains better visibility into pathway barriers and more effective cohort engagement.

Built to complement, not replace, your existing pathways and systems

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

What this means for your organisation

  • For specialty clinical leads

    A practical way to improve preparation, understanding, and follow-through across a real patient cohort.

  • For operational leaders

    A better activation layer around pathways that can support productivity, readiness, and reduced avoidable demand.

  • For patients

    More confidence, more relevance, more support from others at similar stages, and better quality of life through stronger self-management.

  • For the wider system

    A stronger chance of reducing unnecessary healthcare resource utilisation by helping people act earlier, prepare better, and recover more effectively.

Frequently asked questions

Book a Secondary Care Demo

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

  • 30-minute walkthrough tailored to your service and specialty cohort
  • Discussion of your specific pathway and operational priorities
  • Pilot options and how to get started with one cohort
  • Overview of how the model supports readiness, recovery, and activation

Prefer to email directly? info@health-shared.com

Download the Secondary Care Pilot Brief

We’ll be in touch within one working day to arrange your demo.

Turn your specialty cohort into an active patient community

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.

Book a Secondary Care DemoDownload the Secondary Care Pilot Brief
Ask About a Pilot →

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