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How can we make innovation happen in healthcare?

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In a sector where the ambition to innovate responsibly and improve patient outcomes is already widely shared, the real challenge for UK healthcare lies in making it happen. This means navigating organisational complexity, skills gaps, limited capacity, infrastructure challenges and leadership hurdles. How the healthcare sector can move beyond ideas and into delivery was at the heart of the debate at June’s Opencast discussion for TechNExt 2025.

Our panel

Gordon Cullum – Technology Director, Axiologik

Ishika Mukherjee – Senior User Research Consultant, Opencast

Lisa Sewell – Director of Data and Informatics, North East and Yorkshire Genomics Service and Programme Director, Great North Care Record

Murray Ellender – GP and Head of UK Healthcare, Huma (moderator)

a group of four people sitting on a sofa and chairs sit in front of a screen in a room full of people

Panel discussion with three people seated, Opencast banner and screen with medical image in background.

Moving from ideas to delivery

How can the UK healthcare sector turn brilliant ideas into actual delivery? Setting context, Murray Ellender – a practising GP and Head of UK Healthcare at Huma – said that it was important to recognise progress and also celebrate innovation at scale in the NHS.

“It's very easy to drag yourself down into the mire of it being really hard to scale stuff and do stuff in the NHS. But we've all got examples of how it can happen – so we can focus on examples of how things have been brought to life.”

Murray had founded eConsult in 2013 aiming to “unleash the power of healthcare” and provide digital solutions for better health – based on his own experience of the pressures and day-to-day pain points faced by GPs.

Now part of global healthcare business Huma, eConsult’s all-in-one platform facilitates online GP consultations, and its digitally triages patients in primary care and hospital settings.

It's such an interesting and exciting time for technology, he said, but it takes a long time to scale innovation within the NHS. Why is digital innovation so challenging in the NHS?

Lisa Sewell, Director of Data and Informatics at the North East and Yorkshire Genomics Service (NEYGS), said it was critical to focus on purpose and ‘the why’.

“Technology can't do it on its own,” she said. “We need to be clear about what we are trying to solve and ensure we have strong clinical and operational commitment before we even begin to mobilise.”

Without a common purpose, and without trust, innovation could be challenging – and it was also critical to have the right infrastructure in place for effective change. “We need to invest in core infrastructure and interoperability to really release the benefits that innovation can bring,” she said.

Gordon Cullum, Technology Director at Axiologik, agreed that, once you have identified a problem, it was crucial to focus on why it has value.

He pointed to the complexity of the environment – some of which was “accumulated baggage” from the past 30 or 40 years. That could put organisations off from sharing ideas for innovation and change. “They may have had a great idea, but they often think we can’t do it, it’s too hard,” he said. “It’s important to dissociate the idea from the execution.”

Opencast Senior User Research Consultant Ishika Mukherjee said one of the biggest challenges in healthcare is embedding user-centred design (UCD) early enough and there were so many viewpoints to consider – end users, carers, clinicians, case managers and admin staff.

Where healthcare innovation has worked

To highlight what has worked as well as how and why, the panellists shared examples of digital innovation from their own areas of work.

Gordon’s highlighted work done by a private healthcare client looking to scale its core operations to support larger contracts. To help it deliver, Axiologik analysed business flows and conducted user research before designing and delivering any technology.

“It was two or three weeks work for a couple of people – that had a profound impact on the ability of the organisation to support the contract they were working on. The lesson from this is, don't always look for the big problems. Sometimes you can bite off the smaller things much quicker and get a much quicker return to value.”

Ishika highlighted a joint Opencast/DWP project that aimed to make it easier for people to claim health-related benefits. The result was a transformed case management system – and better use of UCD had helped deliver success.

“It wasn't just digitising something or adding a new piece of technology,” she said. “It was really reframing the approach that we were taking to the solution.”

Lisa’s explained the history behind the Great North Care Record and how it grew from an ambition to a holistic response to support direct care and health and social care. She said it worked because it was the right thing to do. “I'm immensely proud of that we've achieved as a region,” she said. “If you have a common ambition and you have the right level of influence in all the individual organisations, the rest will flow.”

New healthcare innovation funding

Murray referenced the government’s recent spending review, which was increasing the NHS technology budget by 50 per cent with £10bn to bring an ‘analogue health system into the digital age.’ He asked what this extra funding would mean for impactful innovation in practice.

Gordon said that, with the review and recently published 10-year healthcare plan, the temptation would be a continued focus on dealing with debt from legacy applications. “Anyone could spin updating legacy tech stacks as being innovation,” he said.

He thought new blood was needed and hoped that some of the extra funding should be used to attract people into the industry with new skills. That would introduce “brand new thinking so the generation behind me thinks very differently about problems.”

Lisa thought clarity was needed on what sort of investment was coming through from the spending review – capital or revenue. She said funds needed to be allocated to the front line to ensure the extra investment had impact, and that impact could be measured at local and system level.

Gordon warned of a “Daily Mail effect” that the NHS was “very exposed to”, attracting bad publicity for initiatives that hadn’t worked. He said failure needed to be embraced, but this was difficult to do in healthcare because it was such a political hot potato. “Whether it's failing fast or whether it's permission to fail and learn, how do we share those learnings so we don't repeat those in a cycle?”

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Unlocking innovation

The panellists shared ideas on how and why innovation could be unlocked, and in which specific areas.

Lisa said information governance and cyber security could be seen as barriers to innovation and this needed rethinking and also embracing.

Offering a user perspective, Ishika described a project she had worked on previously involving young adults with diabetes. The project used general health data and children’s health data so it was sensitive and parents wanted to know how the data was going to be used and why. The team used plain and simple language to describe what they were doing and how it would help their children.

Gordon said the answer was to think more strategically, encompassing data sets that could have a more general governance rule set around them.

The panel agreed that UCD was vital to impactful innovation.

Ishika had worked on a project where a private health company was trying to get its clients to be more proactive with their health. UCD was deployed to explore the things that motivated people to take action on their health. She said the team spoke to clinicians and went on to build a successful product from the inside out, starting with people’s lives.

Lisa pointed to a project around maternity care that enabled any mum in the North East or Cumbria to access to their information, regardless of where they receive their care.

Gordon highlighted a prevention project within NHS England that aims to develop digital solutions to increase the uptake of prevention services. Different screening programmes run on their own business processes, and last year Axiologik took on a piece of work to build out a service blueprint, working across the screening programmes.

“We were using business architecture and language concepts to design a taxonomy to describe the service design,” he explained. “The approach itself had never been tried before. We were actually all in the same room planning it out together.”

Audience watching a panel discussion in a modern room with Opencast banners and a screen about healthcare innovation.

Harnessing AI

A key question for healthcare innovation was, how can AI be harnessed for impact in healthcare? Murray pointed to eConsult’s new HiScribe service, which uses an AI transcriber to free up NHS GP time.

Lisa said that in 2022 the NEYGS started work on a project that would deliver earlier identification of thrombosis – and this was a challenge across secondary care. Last year a solution was delivered that allowed nursing professionals to identify areas of greater need – the list took the heavy lifting out of manual interpretation, delivering significant savings on time.

Gordon said it was important was to steer away from the “Hollywood view” of AI in healthcare. Where it could help was in augmented decision making or automated decision making to free up time for humans to do other tasks. He said developers were using Copilot to augment development phases and generative AI tools in design phases.

But, he added, “the public would naturally reticent if we started talking about things that were taking agency away from a human clinician. Machine learning is ripe for those kinds of things. AI can deliver massive efficiency savings – which can be reinvested elsewhere and so improve health outcomes.”

Ishika highlighted the intersection between UCD and AI, and the data used to train AI models. She said UCD could be used to test that data and gave as an example the diabetes app she worked on, which was built on proxy data from older adults but was planned to be used for younger people. The key was to look at the wider problem that needed to be solved.

When it came to balancing the needs of patients, clinicians and organisations, the panellists agreed that one group had to be the arbiter.

Lisa argued that, if you were looking to prioritise pieces of work that bring value, the patient and citizen should always be at the fore. She added that, although UCD should make things easier for clinical colleagues and helped deliver efficiencies for the organisation and wider community, the patient and the population should always be at the start of any prioritisation and decision-making process.

Gordon argued that, when it comes to your priority user, “that is a leadership question Is there traceability for the things that we care about as change professionals back to the core mission?”

Causes for optimism

On why they were optimistic about innovation in healthcare, the panellists agreed that the spending review and 10-year plan offered a great opportunity, with the announcement of £10bn of new investment proof of the government’s commitment.

“It is an affirmation that our government leadership recognises that this needs investment,” said Gordon. “If that money can be spent wisely, it's big.”

Lisa said she was excited about her new role in the genomic space. “There's always going to be financial constraints, but I would like to think that in the next three years the North East will be recognised as a real player in this space,” she said.

Gordon said data was critical and though data for health was a very sensitive area, there was a growing understanding of its value. “People are more comfortable with their data being used so we suddenly have an opportunity. Where we have secure data environments we can tap into the consciousness that exists,” he said.

Ishika said it was vital to continue the focus on users – and that UCD happens earlier, “shifting to earlier in the process and closer to policy, strategy, so we are thinking about the holistic picture and building in inclusivity and accessibility from the very get go.

“The push toward digitisation from the top is an incredible opportunity for us to push user-centred design further up the chain. That’s something we’re working on here at Opencast.”

Opencast’s ‘Making Innovation in Healthcare’ discussion took place on 18 June 2025 in Newcastle, as part of TechNExt 2025. Watch the full video of the session.