Will Monaghan: ‘We’re seeing enormous value from the FDP’
As group chief digital information officer, Will Monaghan provides digital leadership to a huge workforce of around 30,000 staff, serving two million people across Leicester and Northamptonshire.
The scale of the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire Group has made it an ideal testing ground for national initiatives such as the federated data platform (FDP), with Kettering General Hospital and Northampton General Hospital becoming the first of 44 pilot sites to transition to a local instance of the FDP.
Ahead of his keynote at Rewired in March 2026, Monaghan told Digital Health News about the opportunity for local leaders presented by the FDP and how ambient voice technology (AVT) benefits “every part of the organisation”.
Given the controversy around the FDP, and Palantir’s involvement, why have you embraced it with such enthusiasm?
I think there are some things that work best at national scale. With national procurements we have to accept as organisations within a system that decisions are made in other places, and whether we would have made the same decision is neither here nor there.
For local leaders the choice becomes ‘are you going to make the most of the technology on offer to you and your colleagues for the benefit of patients or not?’
We’ve come down definitively on the side of ‘this is an enormous opportunity for us to fast track our data capabilities and the products that we can use on top of that data’. We’re seeing an enormous amount of value coming out of the federated data platform.
For local leaders the choice becomes ‘are you going to make the most of the technology on offer to you and your colleagues for the benefit of patients or not?’
In UHN we’re incubating a number of products on the platform. We’ve seen a lot of value in theatre productivity and RTT [referral to treatment] validation, and in the ability to share patients [between hospitals].
It’s provided us with the kind of modern infrastructure that we wouldn’t have been able to invest in on our own. We’ve got data stored in useable formats that allows us to build it like Lego bricks to answer a whole variety of complicated questions.
That’s really made a difference to how we’re planning this year. We’ve been able to get through the winter by providing operational teams with near real-time updates on what’s happening with their patients.
But how we report nationally has also changed; that all happens automatically within the FDP – massively reducing the risk of transcription errors and data loss.
How do you see AVT’s contribution to staff and patients?
We’re at the stage where we are moving from pilot to widescale implementation [in April 2026].
I’ve never seen such a strong clinical reaction to the end of a technology pilot. It’s made a material difference to people’s ability to finish their work on time. And its helped patients because they leave the clinic with their letter in their hand or their emails already waiting.
It makes a difference to every part of the organisation because not only are you getting information more quickly, it frees up the time of the people that support our clinicians. Instead of typing letters, they’re able to think about what the right next steps are for individual patients. I think there’s also a difference in the quality of notes when they are produced contemporaneously.
Part of the challenge is that you often pilot with your most enthusiastic clinicians, but the scale rollout will be with all our clinical teams. This is a disruptive technology – it’s important that we support people.
What needs to change to ensure digital tools improve the experience of NHS staff rather than adding to their workload?
We’ve tried to copy the success of the best example of transformation in the public sector around technology: gov.uk. Central to that is designing around user needs.
Success isn’t the amount of technology we’ve rolled out – it’s how people feel about the technology and how it helps them to do their job
That’s the culture we’re continually trying to deliver internally, the sense that what we need to do is build specifically with the end user in mind and optimise for their experience rather than for what works from a technology perspective.
It’s one of the reasons we’ve gone slower with our electronic patient record programme, releasing it module by module; after each phase we will spend time optimising the experience.
Success isn’t the amount of technology that we’ve rolled out, it’s how people feel about the technology and how it helps them to do their job.
How can NHS digital leaders increase trust in AI and support meaningful adoption?
I think the reason we were the first NHS organisation to be invited to join TRAIN Europe [Trustworthy and Responsible AI Network] is that we have always put transparency and responsible deployment of AI upfront.
We’re completely transparent about the AI that we are adopting internally in the organisation and we publish outcomes. We have ways for people to raise concerns.
What has made a real difference is when we’ve talked about what we have not progressed. There have been loads of AI initiatives where we have piloted something for a while and then decided that it wasn’t right for our organisation or we just don’t have the bandwidth to adopt it.
I think we’re getting to a stage where people are realising that evaluating AI opportunities is like evaluating all technology opportunities.
Can you give us a sense of what you’ll be talking about at Digital Health Rewired 2026 in March?
We’re really excited to be able to talk about the FDP – how we get past the scepticism, and the difference the FDP makes in real world applications.
We’ll also be telling the story of how we’ve been working hard over the last 12 months to get beyond the pilot phase of AI.
Monaghan will deliver a keynote at Digital Health Rewired, which is taking place on 24-25 March 2026 at The NEC in Birmingham. Register here.
Rewired 2026’s headline sponsors are The Access Group and Optum, who will also sponsor the Integrated Care and Digital Transformation stages respectively.
