Healthcare leaders at PHIN’s 2026 Quality Forum called for a renewed focus on turning data and emerging technologies into trusted, accessible information that helps patients make informed decisions about their care.

They also stressed the need for greater collaboration across the healthcare sector to ensure that rapid advances in data and artificial intelligence translate into clearer information and safer care.

Speaking at the Private Healthcare Information Network’s (PHIN) 2026 Quality Forum, experts from healthcare, technology, insurance, regulation and patient advocacy explored how an increasingly data-rich health system can make information genuinely useful to patients.

The discussions came as PHIN moves beyond the major milestone of delivering the requirements of the Competition and Markets Authority’s Private Healthcare Market Investigation Order, with almost the entire admitted private healthcare market represented in its data. PHIN now publishes activity information for almost 700 hospitals, while almost 13,000 consultants appear in its data.

PHIN chief executive Ian Gargan said the emphasis now needed to move from collecting information towards putting that information to work.

He told delegates that healthcare data is “only useful if you use it”, arguing that the independent sector has an important role to play alongside the NHS in improving the productivity of the health system.

Private healthcare is changing

Chris Smith-Brown, PHIN Clinical Advisor, presented evidence of a changing private healthcare market.

PHIN recorded just under a quarter of a million insured and self-pay admissions in the first quarter of 2026, broadly unchanged from the same period in 2025. However, beneath that headline figure, insured admissions fell by 2.6%, while self-pay admissions increased by 7.7%. Almost 12,000 consultants were active in PHIN’s data during the quarter, the highest figure recorded for a quarter.

The way treatment is delivered is changing too. Nearly three-quarters of rhinoplasties are now performed as day cases, compared with around one-third in 2018. Six in ten brachytherapy procedures are delivered as day cases, compared with around two in ten in 2018, while the average length of stay for private hip and knee replacements has fallen by more than a day over the same period.

Technology is also reshaping treatment. Robotic-assisted knee replacements increased from around 7% of cases in 2022 to almost 17% in 2025, while the number of sites offering robotic knee replacements more than doubled, from 42 to 88.

But Smith-Brown cautioned against assuming that more information necessarily produces better insight.

“Seeing more does not automatically mean understanding more, and not every comparison is meaningful.”

He argued that patients need context around figures such as outcomes and adverse events, including appropriate denominators, comparable peer groups and explanations of uncertainty.

From publishing data to answering patients’ questions

For PHIN, that creates a shift in emphasis from publishing measures towards answering the questions patients actually have.

Research findings cited at the event (from PHIN’s Creating confidence report) showed that 84% of patients would research private healthcare before making a choice, yet 28% could not name an information source they would use and only around one in four felt confident organising private care. Once PHIN’s role was explained, 82% said they would consider using its information.

Smith-Brown said patients are less interested in individual metrics than straightforward questions such as whether a consultant has treated someone like them before, whether treatment is likely to make them feel better, what it will cost and what will happen if something goes wrong.

PHIN is also exploring how NHS and independent-sector activity could provide a more complete picture of consultants’ experience through its work on ‘whole practice’ data, subject to appropriate governance and safeguards.

AI moves from experiment to patient-facing tool

Artificial intelligence ran through much of the day’s debate, including questions about how healthcare organisations should respond when patients and clinicians are already using generative AI tools.

A panel discussed issues including governance, accountability, fragmented health data and the pace at which organisations can assess and adopt new technologies.

Will Cook from Tandem AI argued that good governance should be viewed as an enabler rather than a barrier to innovation, while Kapil Sahnan, colorectal surgeon, highlighted the need for trust, accountability and greater education for clinicians as AI becomes incorporated into healthcare.

blurred image of a hospital

PHIN also demonstrated its own work in the field

Jules Blanc, PHIN lead software engineer, presented PHINSearch, an internally developed specialist search capability intended to bridge the gap between the everyday language patients use and complex clinical terminology.

As an example, the system was able to interpret a description of cloudy vision and halos around lights and identify cataract surgery as the relevant result, rather than simply relying on the medical terminology a patient may not know. PHIN said its internal benchmarking showed PHINSearch outperforming a recent IBM model by 3.6% for its specific search task.

Carl Warner, PHIN senior software engineer, also outlined plans to make PHIN’s information more accessible to AI systems through Model Context Protocol technology, with the aim of providing trusted, maintained data that AI services can use when responding to healthcare questions.

Blanc stressed, however, that AI should remain a tool rather than a replacement for human responsibility. “AI, at the end of the day, is just a tool. The tool is as good as the people that use it.”

Trust will be critical

That need for human judgement was reinforced during a discussion between the Patient Safety Commissioner, Henrietta Hughes and journalist Deborah Cohen about patient safety in an increasingly digital information environment.

Hughes argued that patients’ voices need to be incorporated throughout the development and implementation of technology, rather than added afterwards. She also stressed that trust could not simply be imposed on patients or healthcare professionals.

“The trust has to be earned with your patients, with your future patients, with their families, and with your workforce as well.”

Cohen highlighted the difficulty patients face navigating health information across social media, AI and other online sources, particularly where commercial incentives are not immediately obvious.

Her call to healthcare organisations was to become trusted sources themselves by providing impartial information in forms patients can understand.

Data must measure value, not just activity

The importance of interpreting data carefully was also highlighted by Helen Hayes from the Office of Health Economics.

Presenting research into NHS payment incentives for diagnostic imaging, she described a 134% increase in average scans per patient following a 2013 payment reform. However, 29% of trusts moved from recording no relevant unbundled scans to recording some after the reform, suggesting that part of the apparent increase may have reflected changed recording behaviour.

Her wider message was that more healthcare activity should not automatically be interpreted as better care, and that organisations using activity data for comparison and transparency need to understand the incentives that sit behind its collection.

Keeping the patient at the centre

Patient safety campaigner Debbie Douglas, who received the forum’s inaugural Patient Contribution Award, brought the debate back to a simple question. “All I want to know as a patient is: is my consultant safe?”

She called for a joined-up approach to NHS and independent sector data and stressed the importance of using information properly to identify potential problems.

The theme was echoed by keynote speaker Maggie Alphonsi, the former England rugby international and broadcaster, who drew on her experience of elite sport to explain how data can improve performance without overwhelming its audience.

Her lesson from broadcasting was that the skill lies not simply in possessing large amounts of information, but in knowing which data matter and when to use them.

It was a fitting conclusion to a forum in which the recurring message was that the independent sector’s next data challenge is not simply collecting more.

It is making the information already available more meaningful, understandable and accessible, while retaining the clinical judgement, transparency and human relationships on which patients’ trust ultimately depends.