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Ric Thompson, senior vice-president of health and care at OneAdvanced, examines what data sovereignty really means for NHS AI.
Artificial intelligence has quickly moved from future ambition to present-day reality across healthcare. From supporting patient access and reducing administrative burden to improving operational efficiency and clinical productivity, AI is already beginning to reshape how health and care services are delivered.
The conversation is no longer about whether the NHS should adopt AI. The question now is how it can do so safely, responsibly and at scale.
The answer lies in trust. Data sovereignty can be a broad and sometimes abstract concept. For NHS organisations, what matters most is practical and specific: that patient data remains resident in the UK, under UK law, and that the AI used to support care is sovereign by design – selected and deployed so that NHS data stays within UK-governed environments. These are the foundations on which trusted AI in the NHS can be built.
Accelerating ambitions
For years, healthcare leaders have focused on digitising services, improving interoperability and creating more connected patient journeys. AI has the potential to accelerate these ambitions significantly. Yet its success will depend on more than the sophistication of the models being deployed. It will depend on whether healthcare organisations have confidence in how their data is managed, governed and protected.
NHS data is one of the country’s most valuable strategic assets, powering patient care, informing clinical decisions and enabling organisations to plan services more effectively. As AI adoption grows, organisations rightly want to understand where that data is processed, who can access it, how it is being governed and whether it remains under their control. These are not simply technical questions. They are strategic questions that sit at the heart of patient trust, regulatory compliance and public confidence.
Healthcare organisations operate within one of the most highly regulated environments in the UK. Patients and clinicians alike need confidence that the systems supporting them meet the highest standards of governance and safety, while enabling innovation to progress responsibly.
This challenge becomes even more significant as AI moves from isolated pilots into everyday clinical and operational workflows.
Across the NHS, AI is already helping to address some of the most pressing challenges facing the health service. In primary care, it is helping practices manage growing demand and improve patient access. In administrative workflows, it is reducing the burden of repetitive tasks such as summarisation, coding and document processing. Across urgent and emergency care, AI has the potential to support more efficient patient navigation and operational decision-making.
The benefits are clear. Yet none of these opportunities can be realised at scale unless organisations trust the infrastructure and governance that underpin them.
This is why data sovereignty and AI adoption should not be viewed as separate conversations. They are fundamentally linked.
Recent developments in healthcare AI, including a partnership between OneAdvanced and NVIDIA to launch the UK’s first private sovereign healthcare LLM trained on NHS Primary Care data, demonstrate how this can work in practice. As organisations explore new ways to apply AI in clinical and operational settings, these initiatives show that innovation can be advanced alongside robust governance, transparency and accountability.
For the NHS to realise the full potential of AI, organisations must be able to innovate without compromising control. Confidence that data is being used securely and responsibly will be essential to adoption at scale. Equally important is the role data sovereignty can play in enabling greater interoperability across the health and care system. The next generation of AI will only be as effective as the data available to it, making trusted frameworks for sharing, accessing and using information securely increasingly important. Data sovereignty helps establish the governance and confidence required to make this possible.
Mutually dependent
The opportunity is not simply to build more powerful AI models. It is to create trusted environments where healthcare organisations can harness advanced AI capabilities while maintaining control of their data and meeting the standards expected by patients, clinicians and regulators.
Innovation and sovereignty should not be viewed as competing priorities. In reality, they are mutually dependent. The organisations that successfully scale AI will be those that establish strong foundations of governance, transparency and trust from the outset.
The NHS has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use AI to improve access, reduce administrative burden and support more connected care. But the pace of innovation must be matched by confidence in the way data is managed and protected.
Ultimately, the future of AI in healthcare will not be defined by technology alone, but by trust. Data sovereignty provides the foundation for that trust, creating the conditions for AI to deliver meaningful benefits for patients, clinicians and the wider health and care system.
As the NHS enters the next phase of its digital transformation journey, data sovereignty will not simply support AI adoption. It will help determine its success.
