In September 2025 the NHS launched a refreshed performance framework and corresponding league-tables for provider trusts. This comes as part of their ‘10 Year Health Plan for England’ in which they’ve stated they will utilise this new league table and PROM data to become the most transparent healthcare system in the world.
While the intention of the new system is to drive transparency and improvement, there is a real danger that Trusts may be rated unfavourably not because the care was poor, but because the data capture was weaker, less timely, or biased.
One of the five key domains used in the league table to segment and rank trusts is titled “Effectiveness and Experience of Care”. And within this domain, a significant sub-category is the measurement of patient experience and the responsiveness of care to patients’ needs.
From Amplitude’s vantage point — as a clinical-outcomes platform partner — this new regime offers both a major opportunity and a significant risk for trusts, particularly in how they capture, interpret, and act upon patient experience data.
The framework will collect a combination of quantitative data and qualitative information annually. However, the way this data is captured varies hugely between Trusts. And that variation itself can meaningfully affect a Trust’s ranking.
Many indicators in the Patient Experience domain depend on how well Trusts can capture, follow-up, validate, and submit patient feedback. For example:
- The Adult Inpatient Survey is conducted annually, often using postal or email surveys managed by external survey contractors. Response rates vary significantly by Trust.
- The Friends and Family Test is highly dependent on local capture methods — Trusts using paper cards or ward volunteers face lower capture completeness.
- PROMs/PREMs data, where collected manually, may under-represent follow-up outcomes, skewing perceived results.
This in turn means a Trust can provide excellent care but still perform poorly in the rankings if its patient-experience capture system is fragmented, manual, or inconsistent.
This shifts the challenge from clinical quality alone to data capture maturity.
How a digital patient-experience platform helps mitigate these risks
At Amplitude we see three critical ways that digital, real-time platforms can help trusts navigate the new regime:
- Automated capture across channels
Deploying PREMs and PROMs via tablets, kiosks, web/email, mobile apps or SMS means more inclusive, timely feedback. The system flags non-responders, automatically prompts follow-up, ensures capture from patients with disabilities, language support, or remote follow-up — improving completeness and representativeness.
- Integrated analytics and trends
Rather than waiting for quarterly national survey results, trusts using digital platforms can view rolling experience dashboards, segment by patient type (age, condition, service line), spot hotspots of poor experience, and proactively allocate improvement resources. This, importantly, improves not just ranking risk, but real-world care quality.
- Linking experience with outcomes and safety
True transformation happens when experience data is not siloed. At Amplitude we emphasise connecting PREMs/PROMs with clinical-outcomes and safety metrics. When a pathway shows declining experience scores and rising readmissions or safety incidents, it becomes a risk red flag. That integrated perspective strengthens a trust’s position in the domain of “Effectiveness and Experience of Care”.
The Opportunity
- Driving continuous improvement
With a platform like Amplitude’s, trusts can move from quarterly snapshots to real-time dashboards of patient-reported experience measures, feedback trends and root-cause insights — which means faster intervention, and ultimately improved patient-centred care.
- Unlocking value from PROMs and PREMs
Traditional patient-experience surveys (e.g., the inpatient survey, Friends & Family Test) give useful data but often with delay, self-selection bias and limited granularity. Conversely, by collecting patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) via a digital platform, trusts can obtain richer, timelier data and therefore more finely target service improvement. This lets trusts not only demonstrate performance (for ranking) but improve it proactively.
- Supporting data-driven culture
A digital platform supports the shift from reactive compliance to proactive self-improvement: empowering clinical and operational leaders with live data, alerts and analytics, rather than relying solely on retrospective, manual reports.
Why this matters now
The new ranking system is public, central to performance oversight, and used in escalation decisions. A low score in patient experience can:
- Affect organisational reputation
- Trigger regulatory scrutiny
- Influence ICS-level commissioning discussions
- Impact clinical recruitment and service confidence
The need to focus on how Trusts accurately capture patient experience outcomes is becoming a strategic performance requirement.
Final word
The new NHS Framework is more than just a performance rank: it reflects the NHS’s intention to place patient-experience at the heart of quality assessment. For trusts, this is a turning point. But it is also a challenge: data capture, speed, granularity and the ability to act on feedback will determine whether a trust thrives or is unfairly penalised.
At Amplitude we partner with Trusts to move beyond simply measuring experience to improving it — linking the patient voice, clinical outcomes and operational performance in one platform. In today’s landscape, that is not optional. It is essential.
