Realistic expectations should be placed on the employment of technology in England’s National Health Service (NHS), along with steering clear of stringent imposition, experts have warned.
Vee Mapunde, co-director at thinktank the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care, highlighted how best to define innovation when it comes to digital tools in healthcare.
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“There’s a lot of talk around AI being brought into the NHS, but the reality is that the tech itself isn’t that intelligent – it’s doing things that the system can do with existing tools,” Mapunde said during a panel at the MEDICA convention, taking place in Dusseldorf, Germany, on 17-20 November.
She highlighted that the NHS gets a lot of innovation “pushed onto it”, yet it does not always help answer the questions that clinicians actually want answered or serves to demonstrably improves patient outcomes.
Mapunde continued: “What we’re looking for is something that is completely new, that’s going to change the way things are done and actually change the entire pathway. For us, innovation is something that serves to transform the entire pathway, not just a particular process.”
The NHS has been keen to embrace technology as part of its wider digitisation initiatives. Rollouts range from updates to NHS apps, hospital digitisation, and more accessible data diagnostics.
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By GlobalDataThe UK’s Labour Government outlined its 10-Year Health Plan for the NHS in July. Aspects of the plan include transforming the NHS from an analogue to a “truly digital” service and shifting towards more of a preventative care paradigm.
There is also the Life Sciences Sector Plan, also launched in July 2025, that aims to use enhanced R&D to drive health innovation and NHS reform.
But routes to transformation might not be easy. Professor Iain Hennessey, director of innovation at Alder Hey NHS Foundation Trust and who was also on the panel, agreed that within the NHS, it can often be the case that technology is foisted on to care teams. Part of Hennessey’s role is to factor in how the introduction of new technology can be well-rationalised and made a “psychologically safer process to change”.
Otherwise, new innovation being introduced can prove “incredibly stressful”, he said, positing what an ideal approach to introducing new innovations should be.
Hennessey said: “Technology is coming ever more rapidly, and this can lead to increased stress for care teams. What you have to do is create a scenario where you’re bringing together individuals from patients to healthcare staff and engineers, considering what the future of healthcare could look like, and designing it together.
“In this way, people are more likely to take to new technologies, in contrast to when new innovations are imposed on them.”
