Personal Data Stores emerge as new HealthTech market to watch in 2025

Exec Summary

Personal data stores (PDS) are secure, digital repositories where individuals can collect, manage, and control their personal health-related information. Think of them as a centralized hub for all your health data, everything from medical records, lab results, and prescriptions to lifestyle details like diet or fitness tracker stats, and even broader factors like your living environment. Instead of this information being fragmented across doctor’s offices, hospitals, or insurance companies, a PDS puts it in one place, under your ownership.

Benefits for Patients

Empowerment and Control: You decide who gets access to your data and when. Want a specialist to see your full history without digging through paperwork? You grant permission. Tired of repeating your story to healthcare professionals? It’s already there for you to share.
Convenience: No more filling out endless forms or chasing down records from different providers. Your health story is ready to go, saving time and hassle at appointments.
Better Care Coordination: If you’re seeing multiple doctors, they can all work from the same up-to-date info, reducing miscommunication or gaps in understanding your needs.
Personalised Insights: With a fuller picture of your health, including non-clinical data like exercise or sleep patterns, you might spot trends or get tailored advice that traditional records miss.

Benefits for Healthcare

Efficiency: Less time is wasted on redundant tests or tracking down missing records. Clinicians can focus on treatment rather than paperwork, potentially lowering costs and speeding up care.
Improved Outcomes: Access to a patient’s comprehensive data—clinical and beyond—helps providers make more informed decisions. For example, knowing someone lives in a high-pollution area might prompt earlier respiratory checks.
Reduced Duplication: When systems don’t have to recreate or re-collect data, it cuts down on administrative bloat and resource use across the board.
Innovation Potential: Aggregated (and anonymized) data from PDS could fuel research or public health strategies, though this depends on patients opting in.

In practice, the success of PDS hinges on a few things: robust security to protect sensitive info, user-friendly interfaces so everyone can manage their data, and standards to ensure different healthcare systems can integrate with it. It’s a shift toward a patient-centric model, but it’s not without hurdles, like ensuring privacy or bridging tech gaps for less digitally savvy folks. Still, the promise of a smoother, more empowered healthcare experience is pretty compelling.

The market potential for PDS in 2025 is significant. They align with global trends toward digital health equity and regulatory frameworks like the European Health Data Space, which emphasize patient control over data. HealthTech companies are likely to invest in PDS platforms to differentiate themselves in a competitive landscape, offering tools for seamless data sharing, real-time health insights, and even monetization opportunities for users who opt to share anonymized data with research entities. While challenges like standardization, user adoption, and regulatory compliance remain, PDS are poised to reshape how health data is managed, making them a key space to watch in 2025.

Nelson Advisors > HealthTech M&A

Nelson Advisors specialise in mergers, acquisitions and partnerships for Digital Health, HealthTech, Health IT, Healthcare Cybersecurity, Healthcare AI companies based in the UK, Europe and North America. www.nelsonadvisors.co.uk

We work with our clients to assess whether they should 'Build, Buy, Partner or Sell' in order to maximise shareholder value and investment returns. Email lloyd@nelsonadvisors.co.uk

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Scotland innovates with Personal data stores

NHS Scotland has been exploring innovative approaches to personal data stores (PDS) as part of its broader push toward digital transformation and patient empowerment in healthcare. While there isn’t a single, fully rolled-out PDS system branded as such across NHS Scotland yet, several initiatives and technologies align with the concept, giving patients more control over their health data while improving care delivery and system efficiency. Here’s how they’re innovating in this space:

Key Innovations

National Clinical Data Store (NCDS)

Managed by NHS Education for Scotland (NES), the NCDS is a centralized repository for key health data, like immunization records (e.g., COVID-19, flu, shingles). It’s not a full PDS in the sense of patient-managed access, but it demonstrates Scotland’s move toward a unified data infrastructure. Patients don’t directly control it, but it enables clinicians to access up-to-date records across regions, reducing duplication. For example, it syncs with GP systems and portals like NHS Highland’s Orion, showing how a central store can streamline care without patients retelling their history.
Scottish Care Information (SCI) Store

The SCI Store, a long-standing web-based system, operates in each of Scotland’s 15 NHS Board areas. It’s designed to share core clinical data, like test results, clinical letters, and GP summaries, across primary and secondary care. While clinician-focused, it’s a foundational step toward integrating data that could eventually feed into a patient-accessible PDS. The goal is seamless, secure data sharing, which aligns with PDS principles of reducing fragmentation.
Patient-Facing Digital Tools

NHS Scotland has been expanding tools like the NHS Inform website and patient portals (e.g., Highland’s Orion Portal), where individuals can view parts of their health records, such as immunisations. These aren’t PDS in the full sense, patients can’t yet upload their own data or control access comprehensively, but they’re shifting toward greater transparency and involvement, a precursor to PDS-like systems.
Research and Safe Havens

The Scottish Safe Haven Network (e.g., National Safe Haven by Public Health Scotland) securely handles de-identified patient data for research. While not patient-controlled, it shows NHS Scotland’s expertise in managing sensitive data at scale, a critical capability for any future PDS. The Charter for Safe Havens emphasises ethical data use, which could extend to patient-managed stores with the right governance.
Collaboration with InnoScot Health

Formerly Scottish Health Innovations Ltd (SHIL), InnoScot Health partners with NHS Scotland to turn staff ideas into practical solutions. They’ve supported over 2,000 innovations, some involving data platforms. While specific PDS projects aren’t publicly detailed, their focus on digital health suggests exploration of patient-centric data systems among the mix.

How This Benefits Patients and Healthcare

Patient Empowerment: A PDS-like approach (even in early forms) lets patients access and potentially share their data, reducing the need to repeat their medical story. Tools like NCDS or SCI Store indirectly support this by ensuring data is ready when needed.
Efficiency: Centralized stores cut down on redundant tests and admin work. For instance, NCDS’s role in vaccination programs ensures clinicians have real-time info, saving time and resources.
Better Care: Holistic data, from clinical records to lifestyle factors, helps clinicians tailor treatments. The layered data vision of PDS could build on systems like SCI Store to include environmental or patient-input data.
Trust and Security: Scotland’s emphasis on “Privacy by Design” (seen in NES and Safe Haven policies) ensures robust protection, a must for patient buy-in to PDS.

The Bigger Picture

NHS Scotland’s strategy, outlined in documents like Care in the Digital Age, prioritizes a “single platform” for health data—a spine that other systems connect to. The NCDS is a proof-of-concept for this, and PDS could be the next evolution, giving patients direct control.

Pilot projects elsewhere (e.g., Greater Manchester’s Personal Online Data Stores using Solid PODS tech) offer a blueprint Scotland might adapt, though no public evidence shows them adopting that specific tech yet.

Challenges remain: ensuring interoperability across legacy systems, scaling patient access without tech barriers, and maintaining trust amid cybersecurity risks. Still, NHS Scotland’s incremental innovations, centralised stores, patient portals, and secure data frameworks, lay the groundwork for a future where personal data stores could truly shift power to patients while streamlining healthcare. It’s a slow burn, but the direction is clear.

Key factors pushing Personal Data Stores (PDS) as a HealthTech market to watch in 2025

Personal Data Stores (PDS) are emerging as a HealthTech market to watch in 2025 due to a convergence of technological, societal, and regulatory factors that are reshaping how health data is managed and valued. Here’s why they’re gaining prominence:

Rising Demand for Data Privacy and Control: In 2025, people are more aware than ever of how their personal health data is collected, used, and sometimes exploited by corporations and healthcare systems. High-profile data breaches, like the 2023 UnitedHealth incident affecting millions, have eroded trust in centralised systems. PDS offer a solution by putting individuals in charge, letting them store their data securely and decide who gets access, whether it’s doctors, insurers, or researchers. This shift from institution-centric to patient-centric data ownership resonates with a growing privacy-conscious public.
Explosion of Personal Health Data: The proliferation of wearables (e.g., Apple Watch, Fitbit), at-home diagnostics (e.g., blood glucose monitors), and telehealth platforms has created a flood of health data that’s often fragmented across ecosystems. By 2025, the average person might generate gigabytes of health-related data annually, yet there’s no unified way to manage it. PDS step in as a central hub, aggregating everything from heart rate logs to lab results, making it easier for users and healthcare providers to harness this information for better care.
Push for Interoperability: Healthcare systems worldwide have long struggled with siloed data, EHRs (electronic health records) from one provider rarely talk to another. PDS address this by enabling seamless, user-controlled data sharing across platforms. In 2025, with initiatives like the US’s TEFCA (Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement) and the EU’s European Health Data Space gaining traction, PDS align perfectly with the drive to make health data portable and interoperable, boosting their appeal to both patients and policymakers.
Advancements in Technology: The tech underpinning PDS, blockchain for security, decentralised storage like IPFS, and AI for data insights, has matured by 2025, making these systems more feasible and scalable. Encryption ensures data stays private, while smart contracts could automate consent for data sharing. This tech stack not only solves practical challenges but also attracts investors and innovators looking to disrupt traditional HealthTech models.
Shift to Personalised Medicine: As healthcare moves toward tailored treatments—think precision oncology or custom fitness plans—patients need a way to pool and analyse their unique data sets (genomics, lifestyle, medical history). PDS enable this by giving individuals a single repository to feed into AI-driven health tools or share with specialists, amplifying the trend toward hyper-personalised care in 2025.
Regulatory Tailwinds: Governments are increasingly mandating patient data rights. The GDPR in Europe, expanded by the 2025 European Health Data Space, and evolving US state laws (e.g., California’s CCPA updates) emphasize individual control over personal data. PDS fit this framework, offering a compliant way for patients to manage their health records while meeting legal standards, which makes them attractive to HealthTech companies navigating these rules.
Economic Incentives: By 2025, there’s growing interest in letting individuals monetize their health data—sharing anonymized records with researchers or pharma companies for a fee. PDS facilitate this, turning data into an asset rather than a liability. This potential revenue stream, even if small, adds a layer of appeal for users and startups alike, positioning PDS as a market with both social and financial upside.
Consumer Empowerment Trends: Beyond health, 2025 sees a broader cultural shift toward self-sovereignty—people want to own their digital lives, from social media to finances. PDS extend this ethos to healthcare, tapping into a zeitgeist where empowerment is a selling point. HealthTech firms see this as a chance to build loyalty with tech-savvy patients who value autonomy.

The combination of these drivers, privacy concerns, data overload, tech readiness, and regulatory support—makes PDS a natural evolution in HealthTech. They’re not just a niche; they’re a response to systemic pain points, promising to bridge gaps between patients, providers, and innovators. That’s why, in 2025, they’re a market to watch: they’re poised to grow from a concept into a cornerstone of how we handle health data.

Nelson Advisors > HealthTech M&A

We work with our clients to assess whether they should 'Build, Buy, Partner or Sell' in order to maximise shareholder value and investment returns. Email lloyd@nelsonadvisors.co.uk

Nelson Advisors regularly publish Healthcare Technology thought leadership articles covering market insights, trends, analysis & predictions @ https://www.healthcare.digital