Reaching the NHS login milestone: Why this moment matters for digital self-management
By Matt Bourne, CTO, Tiny Medical Apps (TMA)
After almost a decade of persistence, iteration and sheer determination, I’m incredibly proud to say that the Digital Health Passport now supports NHS login.
To anyone outside the digital health world, that might sound like a technical footnote, another API enabled, another integration ticked off a roadmap. But for us at Tiny Medical Apps, and for the young people and families we serve, this milestone represents so much more than an authentication step. It marks the moment our platform becomes meaningfully connected to the NHS at a systems level, unlocking new possibilities for self-management, medication adherence, shared care planning, and ultimately better outcomes.
For me personally, as a lifelong believer in open standards, open source and empowering patients with access to their own data, this is a landmark that has been a long time coming.
Why the NHS login matters
From day one, our mission has been to empower people to take control of long-term conditions by giving them the tools, information and support they need and on their terms. But achieving that vision requires more than beautifully designed screens, engaging content, or behavioural nudges. It requires trusted identity, robust governance, and safe pathways into clinical systems.
That’s what NHS login provides.
It gives patients a secure, consistent identity that can be recognised across NHS services. It lets us safely match data, surface care plans, connect to medication ordering systems and, crucially, do all of this without asking teenagers to remember yet another password or fill in pages of personal information.
It provides the backbone for everything else.
A journey of setbacks, lessons and determination
To get here, we’ve navigated more pivots, restarts and organisational restructures than I care to count.
We were one of the very first SMEs included in the NHS login onboarding programme. At the time that felt exciting, a sign that the NHS wanted to support small innovators alongside large trusts and pharmacy platforms. And it was. But the reality of being early meant we were helping shape the path at the same time we were trying to walk it. Requirements changed. Sandpit behaviour differed from production. Documentation lagged behind expectations. Assurance cycles took months.
And through all of that, the teams sponsoring our work changed. Twice. Our first NHS partner was reorganised out of existence. The second shifted strategy away from patient-facing digital experiences. Those moments were tough, we’d invested months of effort, only to be forced back to the start.
But we never changed our mission. And out of that frustration came a realisation: if we wanted to finish this journey, we needed to own our own use case.
So we did.
We reframed our path around medication reordering, leveraging IM1. Rather than waiting for a sponsor to validate the need, we built the case ourselves. Medication adherence had always been at the heart of our work with coroner reports showing that the majority of asthma deaths in young people are preventable. We knew enabling safer, smarter medication journeys would change lives. And because we genuinely understood the clinical need, we were able to guide our platform through the assurance process a third time and succeed.
Raising the bar on clinical safety and user experience
Supporting NHS login isn’t just a technical exercise. It requires redesigning user flows, revisiting hazard logs, proving mitigations, and demonstrating rigorous testing across a wide range of devices, contexts and connection environments.
It also forces you to hold two seemingly opposing principles at once: make onboarding clinically safe and making onboarding simple enough that a teenager actually completes it.
Creating that balance is neither quick nor straightforward. Young people are time-poor, attention-poor and rightly sceptical of friction. They don’t want to wade through safety disclaimers, but they do want to know how to take their inhaler correctly, how to recognise seizure triggers, or when their medication is due.
NHS login allows us to meet them where they are safely, quickly and consistently.
Unlocking the future of a connected patient experience
Now that NHS login is live, what does it mean?
It means that the Digital Health Passport can finally deliver on the vision commissioned in London nearly eight years ago: a space where people can not only see their care plan but actually use it to guide day-to-day decisions.
It means that reordering medication becomes seamless and more importantly, we can now gently nudge users when their expected medication run-out date approaches. If they’re not reordering on time, that’s a clear sign they may not be taking their medication correctly.
Those nudges, reminders and insights aren’t bells and whistles, they are life-saving interventions. Improved adherence is the equivalent of developing a new blockbuster drug for every long-term condition.
And because NHS login gives us the foundation of trust and interoperability, we can now build intelligent services on top of it using clinical data responsibly, transparently, and with full consent.
A platform for many conditions
North Central London’s experience shows that strategic commissioning for iAsthma may have been the original driver, but our vision extends much further. Epilepsy education, sickle cell support, allergy management and whole-person wellbeing now sit alongside each other on the platform. NHS Login means we can link these journeys to care plans, specialist content, and medication records in a safe and scalable way.
As someone who has worked inside the NHS, outside it, and alongside it for nearly 20 years, reaching this point means a lot. It proves that small companies can break through. It proves that perseverance matters. And it proves that when open standards meet patient-centred design, innovation can genuinely change lives.
Read the HSJ coverage of this article here.
