Digital transformation in healthcare is rarely about a single “eureka” moment. Instead, it is a
steady, deliberate march toward better infrastructure, stronger leadership, and smarter
workflows.
Back in 2019, the Scottish Government asked statutory health and social care providers to
complete their first Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA). The goal? To build a collective
understanding of our digital capabilities and ensure that funding, leadership, culture, and
skills are targeted exactly where they are needed most. Since 2023, every year selected
organisations have stepped into validation sessions to provide background and context for
instances where they were unusually far ahead of (or behind) the national picture, or even
their local heath and care system, or where their results did not align with their workforce’s
view.
Far from being a simple box-ticking exercise, these sessions serve a few brilliant purposes:
The Carrot: High-scoring organisations get well-deserved acknowledgement for best
practices, turning their local successes into shareable learning for the rest of the nation.
The Reality Check: Review/ verification of score changes—whether a sharp rise or a
sudden drop—ensures that progress reflects real-world conditions while offering direct
feedback and guidance.
The Support System: For negative outliers lagging behind their peers, validations offer a
constructive forum to flag the specific root causes of their stagnation directly to their
governance groups.
A Closer Look at the 2025 Validation Cohort
From the 2025 update, 13 organisations were invited for validation, with 9 sessions
successfully completed. The focus areas of these 9 were highly targeted:
- 2 focused on validating good practices.
- 3 dug into the mechanics of their score changes.
- 2 evaluated their AI-related readiness and capabilities.
- 2 unpicked the root causes behind a general lack of progress.
For the high flyers, validated areas of excellence included Business and Clinical
Intelligence, Transfers of Care, and Orders & Results Management. Crucially, every
single good practice example was verified using hard evidence, from live demonstrations
and screenshots to accompanying documentation.
The Shareable Goldmine: Key Learnings
The true value of the DMA is that no organisation has to reinvent the wheel. The 2025
validations uncovered an absolute treasure trove of shareable insights across several critical
domains:
- Business Intelligence: A structured, 10-stage Service Review and Redesign
process that provides a robust, well-rounded governance process to support routine
service audits. - Strategic Alignment: Capturing genuine user needs through dedicated Digital
Innovation Days and giving staff access to tablets loaded with curated internet
content. - AI – Information Governance: A suite of AI-specific information governance and
security advice policies, including tailored risk-assessment guidance specifically for
GPs. - AI – Leadership: A forward-looking Board Development Programme and an
executive Horizon Scanning Paper to prep leadership for the future. - AI – Resourcing: Practical M365 Copilot business cases, adoption plans, checklists,
and Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation (SBAR) evaluation
resources. - AI – Skills and Competences: Practical participant guidance alongside structured
training sessions and materials to get teams up to speed on Copilot. - AI – Climate Emergency and Sustainability: Dedicated research and insight into
the environmental impact of deploying Copilot at scale.
The Takeaway: Continuity is Everything
If the data proves anything, it’s that digital maturity is a marathon, not a sprint. Developing
robust data collection habits and a true understanding of these assessment topics requires
continuity.
Overall, close to three-quarters of all organisations (73% / 30 out of 41) have
participated two or more times. Within that group, 16 trailblazing organisations have
completed all three annual iterations, while another 14 have completed two. These recurring
completions give these organisations a robust, data-backed foundation to inform their long-
term digital strategies.
Moving forward, organisations shouldn’t view this as a test to be passed, but as a map to be
shared. By actively engaging with initiatives like the Festival of Transformation,
organisations across Scotland can lean on existing expertise, share their hard-won learning,
and ensure we all move forward together.
The Reality Check: What the 3-Year Trends Tell Us
The DMA is continuously developing to capture the state of digital transformation across all
health- and social care services provided. It expresses that state as a comparison with ‘what
good looks like’ at that time because this offers a true, meaningful assessment of the share
or what could have been done that did get done.
For example, the 2025 assessment included a meaningful number of new, additional metrics
on the topic of AI and LLM technology, which caused a reduction in scores for some
participating organisations. Did those providers get worse at providing digitally enabled
health or social care? Not necessarily – but their road ahead just got a little longer.
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