‘Prevention in the app’ is no more – we’re now ‘Managing my health’. This is positive for us because it gives a clear scope and we no longer share an acronym with ’pain in the arse’.

This week I finished the demo I’ve been building in Swift to show what it looks like when we can connect between health checks, screening and vaccines. It’s similar to what I’d built before, but using the components the app team have been testing as part of their exploration of whether the NHS app should be a native app.

It took me longer than I anticipated to finish because:

  • I’m bad at estimating how long things will take
  • I added a few more pages than I was planning on at the start
  • I spent most of a day this week in eye casualty because I have an inflamed iris
  • I’m teaching myself and using Claude to teach me Swift

Using AI to teach me to program in a new language has been mixed. It’s great in that you have a teacher who can give specific guidance and instant feedback. But also that teacher can be a bit nuts and it’s hard to resist just asking the teacher to do things for me. It’s faster than having to google everything, but also I’m probably not gaining the benefit of seeing adjacent concepts. I’m forcing myself to ask for explanations, but I’ve also just given in and pasted code where I know there’s a typo and can’t be bothered to find it.

When I started learning front‑end for web, a dev gave me a tip I still think about. Type all the things, don’t copy and paste. It helps to retain the things you need. With Claude, it’s not just copy and pasting I’m actively resisting but also just having the LLM write my code for me. I try not to put anything into my work that I don’t understand.

What else could a cross‑cutting team do?

The first phase is understanding what teams across Digital Prevention Services are working on. Over the next few weeks we’ll find where connecting journeys might improve outcomes and run experiments around these.

I’ve been thinking about what else we can do. Prevention governance is local – local authorities commission behaviour change, ICBs own screening uptake, vaccination happens through pharmacies and GPs. But the app is national. How do we design for this?

What if local commissioners configured what appears for their population? Local authorities choose to offer blood pressure monitoring in the app. Areas with low screening uptake surface it more prominently. Vaccination teams add their pop‑ups.

This mirrors existing accountability. Local commissioners already own outcomes – the app could extend that instead of creating something parallel. We offer more control, in exchange for more responsibility.

The obvious difficulty is capacity. We need to find ways that support or build on existing processes and incentives.

My eye is fine. Just needs 245 eye drops over the next 6 weeks.