NHS Digital is the information and technology partner to the National Health Service. In the words of Owain Davies, Lead Product Owner at NHS Digital, it is “just one part of one of the country’s best-known institutions”.

When Davies took up his role in September 2016, he and his team set out to digitally transform the web presence of the NHS, which has the vital job of catering to hundreds of thousands of NHS workers and patients alike.

NHS Digital embodies a number of apparent contradictions: it is both professional and patient-facing, and although its websites carry primarily content and resources, they are structured and behave more like ecommerce websites. Above all, Davies stressed, the NHS “isn’t here to sell you something” – its mission is simply to help people get to the information that they need as quickly as possible.

At Festival of Marketing 2019, Davies explained to a packed room on the Digital Transformation stage how his team transformed and modernised the NHS’s online customer experience, making its information as accessible and discoverable as possible, and what results they have seen so far from their efforts.