It is a fair question: if the NHS already gives me an app with my GP record in it, why would I keep a health record of my own as well?
The short version is that they are different kinds of thing, and they are not really competing. The NHS App is a window onto records the NHS holds about you, mainly your GP record. A personal health record app is your own copy, which you fill in and nobody sees unless you decide they should. Most people are better off with both, for the same reason you keep your own payslips even though HMRC has the figures too.
Disclosure
I am a doctor, and I founded exora, which is a personal health record app. So I have a stake in one half of this comparison, and you should read it accordingly.
What I have tried to do about that: describe the NHS App fairly, including what it does better than any app can, and be specific about where a personal health record app, mine included, does not help. If you want a wider comparison of the UK apps themselves, I wrote one here.
The short answer
- The NHS App is the official app for people in England. It shows information from your GP record, lets you order repeat prescriptions and, if your surgery allows, book appointments. It fills itself in, it is free, and it is where new GP test results and letters appear.
- A personal health record app is a private record you create and control. You fill it in, by uploading documents or typing. Nobody can see it, including your doctor, unless you share it.
- The practical difference: the NHS App shows what the NHS puts in front of you, mostly from your GP. A personal health record is everything you can gather, from anywhere, in one place.
What the NHS App actually is
To use the NHS App, you must be aged 13 or over and registered with a GP surgery in England. You can also log in through the NHS website without downloading anything.
The most important thing to understand is what changed in 2023. All GP practices in England are now contractually required to give patients online access to new information as it is added to their GP record. That includes free-text notes, medications, test results, records of appointments, and letters sent to the practice by other services, such as outpatient clinic letters and discharge summaries. It applies to the NHS App and to the other approved apps, such as Patient Access and Airmid.
That is a real achievement. If you are registered with a GP in England, you can usually read what your GP wrote about you, and see a test result within a few days of the test, without asking anyone.
What is in it, and what is not
The word that matters in that requirement is new. It covers record entries made since access was switched on, not your history before it. The NHS App’s own help page on test results is direct about this: if a test was carried out before October 2023, it may not appear automatically, and you need to ask your GP surgery for older results.
The same page lists other gaps. A test result may be missing because it was ordered by a hospital, because you had it done privately, or because it was a maternity check. Some hospital-ordered results can be seen through Patients Know Best, a service inside the app, but the NHS describes that access as “limited”.
Some things are held back on purpose. GP staff can hide an entry, temporarily or permanently, where seeing it could cause serious harm or distress (NHS England), and a clinician should wait to release a result they need to discuss with you first. That is a reasonable safeguard, but it means the app is not always the whole picture even for recent care.
Documents are a mixed picture. You can see documents added by your GP surgery, such as referral letters, discharge documents, scan reports and hospital letters sent to your GP, and some hospitals add appointment and outcome letters directly. You can download documents. But the NHS also says some providers do not share hospital documents in the app at all. And you cannot download your test results; the app tells you to contact your GP surgery for a copy.
One thing it does well: some users can see a test’s history as a line graph, where the same test has been done at least twice in three years. That depends on your GP surgery.
The Summary Care Record
Separate from what you see, there is what other NHS staff can see. The Summary Care Record is a national database created from your GP record. It holds important information such as your current medication, allergies and any previous bad reactions to medicines, and it is updated whenever a relevant change is made to your GP record.
It can be seen by authorised staff elsewhere in the health and care system who are involved in your direct care, away from your usual GP practice. Your GP surgery records whether you consent to having one, so you can tell them if you would rather not. NHS England also notes its limits: it may be out of date, it may not be complete if you have recently changed GP, and sensitive entries can be withheld from it.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
The NHS App is for England. The other nations have their own, and what each shows differs.
- Wales: the NHS Wales App, from Digital Health and Care Wales, offers prescriptions, appointments, waiting list referrals, messages from your GP practice and hospital, and a health profile, depending on what your practice makes available.
- Scotland: MyCare.scot, published by NHS Education for Scotland for people aged 18 and over, shows your CHI number, some personal details, your medication and allergy information, and some vaccination records.
- Northern Ireland: the My Care patient portal shows appointments, some test results and letters about your care. In its own words, it “does not include GP records”, and it does not include records from before the encompass system was introduced (Northern Health and Social Care Trust).
What is planned, and not here yet
The government’s 10 Year Health Plan proposes a single patient record that brings all of a patient’s records together. Its own wording is careful: “Subject to Parliamentary time, our ambition is that from 2028, patients will be able to view their SPR securely” on the NHS App, and nothing takes effect until regulations are in place (Department of Health and Social Care, May 2026). It is a plan, not a service you can use today.
Everything else: your right of access
For anything the app does not show, you have a legal route. Under Article 15 of the UK GDPR, you can ask any provider, NHS or private, for a copy of the information it holds about you. It is usually free, and they have one month to respond, extendable only in limited cases (Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 76). This is called a subject access request, and it works across all four nations. Our UK records guide walks through it step by step.
That is how you get your full GP history, hospital notes and private clinic letters. No app does the asking for you.
What a personal health record app is
A personal health record belongs to the patient, not to a provider or the state. The category ranges from a manual logbook on your phone to a cloud service that reads your documents for you.
Two properties define it. You fill it in, by uploading documents, connecting a device or typing. And you control access completely: by default nobody else can see any of it, including a doctor treating you, until you choose to share.
That cuts both ways. Nobody reading your private app in an emergency is a privacy feature and a safety limitation at once, which is why it is no substitute for the NHS’s own records.
Before you put years of documents into any app, ask where the data lives, under whose laws, and what happens if the company shuts down.
The six differences that actually matter
1. Who fills it in
The NHS App is fed by your GP surgery and some hospitals, automatically. A personal health record is fed by you: more work, and the reason it can hold things the NHS never put online.
2. Who can see it
Your GP record is seen by the clinicians at your practice, and its summary by authorised staff involved in your care elsewhere. A personal health record is seen by nobody until you share it. Neither is simply better; they suit different purposes.
3. A view versus your own copy
The NHS App shows you records held in NHS systems. A personal health record holds the actual documents - the photographed letter, the private lab’s PDF, the scan from 2009 - and, in apps that read them, the information pulled out.
4. How far back it goes
The biggest practical gap. For many people the detailed record in the NHS App starts in late 2023, unless they have asked their surgery for more, and it holds little from private care and nothing from abroad. A personal health record goes as far back as the documents you can lay hands on.
5. What you can do with it
The NHS App is built for reading your GP record and doing GP admin, and it does that well. Personal health record apps vary, but the better ones let you search everything, follow a result over many years across different labs, and share a chosen part of your record with a chosen person for a set time.
6. What happens when you move
The NHS App is for people registered with a GP surgery in England. Move to Scotland or abroad and you leave it behind. A personal health record goes wherever you go.
Three situations that make it concrete
You are in a clinic in Spain and the doctor asks what you take
You remember two of your medicines. The dose of the third, and the antibiotic that gave you a rash in 2019, are gone. To be fair, you can open the NHS App and hold up the screen, and plenty of people do. But that depends on a signal and on you feeling well enough to navigate it, and the clinic is left with nothing for its file. Your Spanish doctor cannot be given access to the NHS App.
With a record of your own, you send a link that shows your medications and allergies and nothing else, set to expire in two days. The doctor opens it in a browser. When you get home, you switch it off.
A new private consultant wants the relevant history, not your life story
You are happy for a cardiologist to see your medications, conditions and recent bloods, and would rather they did not read everything else.
The NHS App is designed for you to read your own record. I could not find a feature in its help pages for sending a chosen part of it to a named person for a set period. A personal health record shares by category, to one person, with an expiry, and can be revoked from one screen.
You are unconscious in an A&E in Manchester
Here the NHS is the right tool, and nothing on your phone is any use at all. Authorised staff involved in your care can look at your Summary Care Record without you doing a thing. No personal health record app solves this, including mine. A locked phone in a bag is not a health record.
Consent runs in opposite directions. NHS records are available to the clinicians caring for you because that is what makes emergency care safe. A personal health record asks first: access exists only because you created it, for the scope and period you chose. A record built for emergencies cannot stop to ask, and one that asks first cannot be there in an emergency.
And the counterweight, because it belongs here rather than in a footnote: none of this makes the NHS careless with your information. Your GP record is governed by data protection law, safeguarding rules and a regulator you can complain to. A young private company, mine included, cannot match that kind of institutional accountability, and you should weigh it accordingly.
So do you need both?
For most people, yes, and they complement each other.
Keep the NHS App for your GP. It is free, it fills itself in, and it is where new results and letters land. Use it for prescriptions and appointments, and check it after tests.
Keep your own record for everything else. The years before 2023. The private care. The hospital that does not share documents in the app. The time abroad. The question “when did this start?” that nobody can answer without reading twelve letters side by side.
The two failure modes are equally common: assuming the NHS App is complete, and assuming clinicians can see your own app. Neither is true.
Where exora fits
exora is a personal health record app, so everything above about the category applies to it. What it adds is the reading. You upload documents, such as PDFs, photos or scans, and exora reads them for you, with a reading system built for medical records. It pulls out the clinical details and builds one searchable record with a timeline. Results from different labs land on one trend line. Every fact links back to the document it came from, so you can check it. You can share a chosen part of your record by link, with an expiry, and revoke it at any time. Your health data is never used to train AI models. exora is free to start, with an optional membership.
Where it does not help, plainly:
- No NHS connection. exora has no link to the NHS App, NHS login, your GP’s system or any NHS service. You download documents from the NHS App, or request your records, and upload them yourself.
- Your data is stored in Sydney, Australia. That is outside the UK. exora has no NHS approval or UK health-data certification. How we handle data is on our security page; read it before you upload anything.
- Your doctor cannot see it unless you share it. That is the category’s defining property, not a gap we can close.
- It cannot get documents you do not have. The subject access request is yours to make.
- It can misread. The reading is automated, so check anything that matters against the original. That is why every fact links back to it.
- It is not medical advice. It organises your information. It does not diagnose or tell you what to do.
A reasonable starting point
If you want one concrete sequence: open the NHS App and see what is actually there. Download the documents you find. Ask your GP surgery for access to your older record, or make a subject access request for the full copy. Ask any hospital or private clinic that treated you for theirs. Then put it all in one place you control.
The NHS’s layer and your own layer answer different questions. It is worth having both.
Sources
- NHS website: NHS App (age and GP registration in England)
- NHS England: online access to new GP health record information (prospective access, what it includes, hidden entries)
- NHS App help: viewing test results (results before October 2023, hospital, private and maternity gaps, no download, result graphs)
- NHS App help: viewing documents (GP and hospital documents, downloading)
- NHS England: Summary Care Records
- Department of Health and Social Care: single patient record equality impact assessment (2028 ambition)
- UK GDPR, Article 15 and Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 76 (right of access, one month)
- NHS Wales App, MyCare.scot and My Care (Northern Ireland)
Claims about the NHS App and NHS records are sourced to NHS England, the NHS website, the Department of Health and Social Care and the legislation, linked inline, and were checked on 9 November 2026. NHS services change often; this page will be updated as they do. This article is general information about software and how these systems work, not medical or legal advice.
