The case for Proactive Care, told by the people building it

For years, Proactive Care has been a direction of travel - a phrase in strategy documents, a shift the NHS has long been working toward, without always having the models or means to deliver it at scale. That's changing. Over the past three months, we published Inside Proactive Care - a thirteen-part video series featuring the leaders, clinicians, advisors and builders behind Doccla's model, sharing what this shift actually requires: clinically, operationally, commercially and at a national level.

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🎥 Watch the full Inside Proactive Care playlist →

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Where it starts: vision and founding intent‍

Two founding threads run through the series. The first is personal. Martin Ratz's experience of a heart attack in his 40s gave him a direct view of how care works inside a hospital - real-time monitoring, clinical teams watching for signs of deterioration, support available around the clock - and how different it feels outside one, where support too often becomes fragmented and reactive. The need for monitoring doesn't disappear when someone goes home, and Proactive Care is built on the idea that the care should follow.

"Frankly, after talking about proactive care for decades, we are finally making it happen for the many."

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The second thread is clinical and scientific. Doccla's earliest work asked whether unplanned deterioration could be anticipated using passive wearable sensors - an NHS England-funded question that helped lay the foundations for the model. That thinking has since evolved from individual biomarkers to population health, from single-patient risk to anticipating demand across whole cohorts.

Delivering it: the operational and clinical reality

Moving from reactive to proactive is not just a strategic shift - it requires a different operating model entirely. That means moving from episodic to longitudinal care, rom 9-to-5 to round-the-clock monitoring, and from responding to crisis to intervening before it occurs. A key concept that surfaces in the series is "Minus Nine" indicators: identifying clinical risk nine days before a likely admission, and using that window to act.

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The clinical dimension is just as fundamental. For patients living with complex, long-term conditions, care is rarely linear - it spans physical, psychological and social needs and too often becomes fragmented across services. Multidisciplinary teams change that by bringing together clinicians, health coaches and wider system partners to make shared decisions, coordinate support and intervene earlier, with care built around the individual rather than the episode.

Scaling it: what national adoption actually requires

Scaling Proactive Care across Integrated Care Systems starts with putting population health data to work - identifying the cohorts most likely to benefit, intervening earlier and measuring impact. Done well, this improves flow and reduces pressure across urgent and acute services. But the operational shift alone is not enough.

The series is clear on what else is needed. Proactive Care sits at the centre of the three shifts set out in the 10-Year Health Plan, but moving from pilot to national model requires incentives and tariffs aligned to prevention, clear national mandates and collaboratives that support adoption at scale. New models of care also need new models of funding. As Tom, Chief Commercial Officer, puts it: "Intervening early is almost always more effective and more efficient than responding once deterioration becomes a crisis." Value-based approaches that reward keeping patients stable and well at home - rather than individual interactions - are what make that sustainable. For complex, multimorbid cohorts, partnerships also need a longer runway and shared data to measure what works.

The technology behind it

As proactive models scale, the technology behind them must stay patient-centred, make better use of data and remain simple for clinicians and patients alike. New advances in AI - from voice automation to clinical copilots - have the potential to extend the reach of Proactive Care without losing the personalised, human quality that makes it work.

That's where we are. Not a vision. Not a pilot. A model that is running, producing outcomes and showing what the NHS can look like when care moves earlier.

Find out more about Doccla's Proactive Care model →

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