Here’s a number worth sitting with: only 19% of UK public sector decision-makers consider their organisation’s digital transformation completely successful. That’s from a KPMG and Forrester study specifically looking at the UK health sector, organisations with dedicated IT departments, actual transformation budgets, and people whose entire job is making this work.
If that’s the success rate with all of that in place, what exactly is a solo GP, a small physio clinic, or an independent dentist supposed to do with none of it?
I work in digital transformation for healthcare. Not as a clinician, as someone who spends his working life on exactly this problem, in exactly this sector. And the thing nobody quite says out loud is this: most of what gets called “digital transformation” in healthcare was designed for organisations that look nothing like the majority of UK private practice.
The same reasons big, well-funded transformations fail, just with nothing to catch you
That KPMG research is specific about why healthcare digital transformation struggles even with real institutional backing: 57% of decision-makers cite a lack of clear technology strategy, another 57% cite insufficient training, and 36% say they simply lack the technical skills in-house to make it work.
Sit with that for a second. These are organisations with a CIO, an IT department, a training budget, and they’re still failing for want of strategy, training, and skills.
Now picture a private GP running their own list, or a two-person physio practice. They don’t have 57% too little training. They usually have none at all, because nobody budgeted for it, because there was never a department whose job it was to think about it in the first place. The same forces that trip up an NHS trust with real resources behind it don’t get smaller for an independent practitioner, they get worse, because there’s nothing there to absorb the failure.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s who it was actually built for.
A recent Forbes Councils analysis put it plainly: most healthcare digital transformation is “technology layered onto broken systems, creating more complexity instead of less”, tools bolted onto operating models that were never touched. I’d go a step further, specifically for the independent and private end of the market: most of these tools weren’t designed with a solo practitioner or small clinic in mind at all. They’re enterprise software, scaled down (badly), sold to people who never needed the enterprise version’s complexity in the first place.
Separate research from FPT Software’s 2026 global study with Forrester found 41% of decision-makers struggle specifically with integrating new tools into existing workflows, and 38% cite fragmented, siloed data as a core barrier. That’s the exact experience of a small private practice trying to bolt a “modern” booking system onto a paper diary, or a compliance tool onto a process that was never written down to begin with. The tool assumes an existing digital foundation. Most independent practices don’t have one.
Private healthcare in the UK is bigger, and more fragmented, than the transformation industry seems to notice
This matters because of scale, not just principle. UK private healthcare admissions hit a record high last year, the fourth consecutive record year, according to PHIN. A meaningful share of that care is delivered by independent practitioners and small clinics, not large hospital groups with their own IT function. The “enterprise transformation, scaled down” approach isn’t a niche gap in the market. It’s the market, largely ignored by an industry that keeps building for the 19% who already have the infrastructure to make transformation projects survive.
What actually needs to change
I don’t think the answer is “try harder at the same kind of transformation.” The KPMG data is fairly damning on that front even for organisations with every advantage. I think the honest answer is that digital transformation for independent healthcare providers needs to look nothing like the enterprise version, not a scaled-down hospital system, not a generic SaaS tool retrofitted with a stethoscope icon, but something built from the actual constraints of running a small, independent practice: no IT department, no training budget, no time to spare between patients.
That’s a genuinely different design problem, not a smaller version of the same one.
If you’re a UK healthcare provider who’s tried to “go digital” and found the tools simply weren’t built with someone like you in mind, I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Not because I have a tidy answer ready to hand over. Because I think the people who’ve actually lived this friction are the ones worth listening to before anyone builds the next thing claiming to solve it.
Drop a comment, or send me a message.
