Skip to content

techUK Health and Care Summit 2026: From Analogue to Digital, and What Comes Next

15 October 20265 min read
Event Round-up
techUK Health and Care Summit 2026: From Analogue to Digital, and What Comes Next

The shift from analogue to digital is already happening across health and care. The question now is whether the system can match industry's pace. That was the message running through techUK's fourth annual Health and Care Summit on Thursday 8 October, which brought together members, partners and leaders from across government, the NHS, social care and industry.  

The Summit also saw the launch of our new report, From Analogue to Digital: How the UK Technology Sector Can Deliver the 10 Year Health Plan. It brings together case studies from across our membership showing the shift to digital working at scale today. It also sets out what is still missing: procurement that doesn't make a proven solution start again in every trust, funding models built for sustained rollout rather than one-off pilots, and local government and social care treated as full partners.  

Over the day, sessions covered NICE's role in health tech, the single patient record, scaling innovation, women's health, the Life Sciences Sector Plan one year on, health and care across the devolved nations, AI regulation and the future of adult social care. Here are the key takeaways.  

Opening: money, method and motivation 

Opening the day, Matt Evans, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Markets at techUK, reflected on another significant year in which the 10-Year Health Plan has started to move from ambition to delivery. The Health and Social Care programme has run 54 events so far this year and fed member input into consultations including the National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare.  

Richard Haynes, Vice President at headline sponsor Capgemini, drew on a case study from the report: the rollout of shared digital care records in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France. Starting with just two areas and a handful of multidisciplinary teams, the programme was designed around what frontline teams needed and grew through word of mouth. He summed up the lessons as money (guaranteed funding for at least five years), method (community-first and user-centred) and motivation (letting the people delivering care drive change).  

Opening keynote: NICE and the postcode lottery in health tech 

Professor Jonathan Benger CBE, Chief Executive of NICE, set out a clear personal commitment to health technology as a growth area for NICE, and said NICE would entirely support the recommendations in our report. His key points were:  

  • Evidence across the lifecycle. NICE's early use assessment programme is designed to bring promising technologies into the system early and make clear what evidence NICE needs for a full recommendation. NICE is now working with three times more companies than five years ago, and its digital programme is 30 times bigger. 

  • The National HealthTech Access Programme. NICE was founded in 1999 to end the postcode lottery in medicines. The programme aims to do the same for health tech, using technology appraisals, which carry a legal duty to fund within 90 days, alongside commercial routes to funding. The first technologies include capsule sponge testing and AI for histopathology. 

  • Social care. NICE is updating its Evidence Standards Framework for social care, due next year. His challenge to the room was to bring the quality evidence NICE needs to make recommendations in social care. 

  • Prevention. NICE is looking at how its committees can place greater value on preventative technologies, recognising the difficulty of prioritising future benefit over people who are ill today. 

 He also described a strategy refresh taking NICE to 2030, which will put guidance at the fingertips of clinicians and, for the first time, patients.  

Analogue to Digital: how industry can deliver 

Chaired by Shane Tickell, outgoing Chair of techUK's Health and Social Care Council, this panel promised "15 out of 10" on the controversy scale and delivered. It brought together Lauren Bevan (Capgemini), Sally Rennison (Patients Know Best), Dr Charlotte Refsum (Tony Blair Institute) and Karen Craddock (Hippo Digital). Key takeaways were:  

  • Be clear what problem the single patient record is solving. Panellists warned that it risks becoming expensive digital plumbing for the NHS alone. Its real value lies in acting as a gateway that lets patients, and the innovators serving them, use their data to access new models of care. 

  • The NHS App should be a trusted front door that industry can build on, rather than everything being reinvented centrally. That needs open roadmaps and a delivery plan underpinning the 10 Year Health Plan. 

  • Patients, carers and the wider workforce must be in the room. That includes social care, housing, education and the third sector. People are increasingly acting as consumers: 13% of GP appointments are now private, and data about people is building up outside the NHS. 

  • The gains come from new models of care, not new tools. Dropping a technology into an existing workflow changes little. Productivity comes from redesigning the workflow and reallocating tasks between people and technology. 

Scaling innovation in health and care 

Sponsored by Mills & Reeve and chaired by Heather Cook (Ripple Scale), this panel started from a simple premise: the UK has no shortage of innovation, but it struggles to move from pilot to scale. Heather was joined by Matthew Payne (Healthtech-1), Gayle Curry (Mills & Reeve), Josh Robson (ScaleUp Institute), Will Goddard (Big Health) and Abigail Lyons (Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre). Key takeaways were:  

  • Market access, not money, is the biggest barrier. The UK's health, social care and life sciences scale-ups employ nearly 400,000 people. The Procurement Act has shifted the law in favour of SMEs, but practice still lags behind, with complex frameworks and requirements such as parent company guarantees shutting out younger firms. 

  • A NICE recommendation is not enough for digital therapeutics. Four years after Sleepio was recommended by NICE, there is still no funding mandate or national procurement route in England. Scotland's national Digital Therapies Programme shows what is possible. 

  • Design pilots for scale from day one. Choose representative sites, agree baseline data and outcomes up front, and know who the economic buyer will be. Healthtech-1's journey to 26% of GP practices in England shows the value of simple, transparent, outcome-based pricing. 

  • Think in pathways, not point solutions. Collaboration between SMEs, and budgets built around whole pathways, would help innovation land without simply moving a bottleneck elsewhere. 

 Will also highlighted the NHS England SME advisory group as a route for SMEs facing unfair barriers in procurement. 

From pilot to scaled adoption: breaking the cycle that holds women's health back 

Chaired by Charlotte Lewis (Mills & Reeve), Vice Chair of techUK's Health and Social Care Council, with Lloyd Humphries (Cogniss), Dr MaryAnn Ferreux (NHS), Bushra Effendi (Elmar Health Service), Tiffany Dove-Abbram (Dove Foundation) and Viktoria McMillan (System C). Key takeaways were: 

  • Shift the language and the lens. Talking about the “health of women” rather than “women’s health” puts cardiovascular disease, mental health and menopause alongside sex-specific conditions. Every health tech company should ask how its product affects women differently, for example by using Equality Health Impact Assessments. 

  • Bias starts with the data. Women and ethnic minority groups have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials, so AI trained on those datasets risks building in inequity. Listening directly to women and testing products on diverse groups are essential. 

  • Meet people where they are. Digital access is tied to devices, literacy and cultural barriers. Community models like Bradford’s tech cafés and tech ambassadors show how to close the gap, instead of labelling communities “hard to reach”. 

  • The sector has a scaling problem, not an innovation problem. Around 900 maternity recommendations already exist, so the challenge is putting them into practice. That takes sustained leadership, accountability and visible progress. Industry can help by working together on shared evaluation and proof-of-value measures that policymakers recognise. 

One year on: the Life Sciences Sector Plan 

Chaired by Alex Eavis (Genomics), Chair of techUK's Life Sciences Working Group, this panel took stock a year after the Life Sciences Sector Plan was published. Alex was joined by Alasdair Cowie-Fraser (Health Data Research Service), Anisha Levenston (GSK) and Polly Shepperdson (First Databank). Key takeaways were:  

  • The Health Data Research Service (HDRS) is moving at pace. Jointly funded by Wellcome and government, HDRS expects to operate independently from November. It has funded 43 technical transformation projects across the UK's secure data environments and aims to put software in front of users within a year. It wants to partner with industry rather than compete, and will be going to the market for partners. 

  • The single national formulary is infrastructure, not a drug list. Capturing why a medicine was prescribed will be key to designing precision pathways and tracking outcomes. 

  • Health data is central to the UK's competitiveness. R&D increasingly starts from understanding populations and patients, and linked, research-ready data is what has been missing. 

  • Pace and sustained commitment matter. Industry called for government to understand how life sciences R&D works and to front-load investment to keep up with international competitors. HDRS stressed that this cannot be restarted every 18 months. 

 The panel also discussed the opportunity to scale pharmacogenomics into routine care, rolled out mindfully and with a health equity lens, given that clinical trials have historically under-represented many communities.  

In conversation: health and care across the devolved nations 

Matt Robinson, techUK's Head of Nations and Regions, was joined by Helen Thomas, Chief Executive of Digital Health and Care Wales, for a candid conversation about digital health in Wales under a new Welsh Government. Key takeaways were:  

  • Strong foundations are in place. Every GP practice in Wales is now on a single clinical system, and the NHS Wales App has passed 900,000 registered users in a population of just over three million. 

  • Data is the fulcrum. Wales' National Data Resource is built on open standards so data can follow the patient, whichever system is used. Around a quarter of records are now accessed outside a patient's home health board. 

  • AI needs to be safe and strategic. Wales has introduced a procurement framework for ambient voice technology and an AI policy framework, balancing safety and cyber resilience with not stifling local innovation. 

  • The ask of government is certainty. Helen called for absolute clarity on the North Star and predictable, consistent funding, since late, single-year settlements disrupt delivery. 

 Audience questions highlighted the need for better data sharing across the four nations, with Helen pointing to the European Health Data Space as a model worth aligning with. techUK will continue these conversations at our Welsh tech reception in Cardiff on 20 October.  

AI in health: regulation, safety and adoption at scale 

The session came just two days after government accepted all 44 recommendations of the National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare. Chaired by Sue Daley, techUK's Director of Technology and Innovation, it opened with an overview from Professor Alastair Denniston, who chaired the Commission. He was joined by Ahmed Binesmael (Health Foundation), Fiona Dawson (Mayden), Mel Heath (Littlefish) and Barnaby Newell (Box). As Sue put it, industry is not asking for less regulation, but for regulation that is proportionate, predictable and designed for how AI works. Key takeaways were:  

  • Regulation as a scaffold, not a straitjacket. The Commission set out three themes: a proportionate lifecycle approach, including conditional authorisation; shared responsibility across manufacturers, users and providers; and trust, transparency and predictability. Industry strongly welcomed the move to function-based regulation. 

  • Public support is real but conditional. Health Foundation research found 38% of the public think AI will improve care, against 19% who think it will make it worse. Support is higher for administrative uses (66%) than for patient care (54%), and drops by up to 40 percentage points when humans are removed from the loop. 

  • Implementation is now the priority. Suppliers need clarity on classification and a clear roadmap, while organisations need a confident and competent workforce and ready digital infrastructure. 

  • Liability is narrower than people fear. Contracts should set out who does what to keep a technology safe, including sharing data back to manufacturers for post-market surveillance. 

 As Sue concluded, this is "the start of the start". techUK is committed to working with members, government and regulators on how the recommendations are put into practice.  

Closing keynote: technology and the future of adult social care 

Closing the day, Sarah McClinton, Chief Social Worker for Adults at the Department of Health and Social Care, brought the focus back to people. Adult social care, she reminded us, is about enabling people to live the lives they want to lead. With the Prime Minister committing to a national care service in the next Parliament, she said she had never before seen this level of political commitment to reform. Key takeaways were:  

  • Technology is a critical enabler of reform. Digital social care records are now used by 82% of registered care providers. Government's ambition is for all providers to be fully digitised by the end of this Parliament, backed by new national data infrastructure for care. 

  • The shift to prevention is already visible. Sensor-based technology has reduced falls in care homes by 32%. More than 80% of local authority social care teams now use AI to transcribe and summarise assessments, freeing social workers to focus on the person in front of them. 

  • Start with the problem, not the technology. The question should never be how to introduce more technology, but what problem we are trying to solve and how we work together to solve it. 

  • Partnership and co-production matter. Sarah welcomed the report's call for government and industry to work together as equal partners, and encouraged everyone to contribute to Baroness Casey's Big Conversation on Care. 

What comes next 

Across every session, the same themes came through: clarity on evidence and pathways, procurement and funding that support scale, data that follows the person, and patients, carers and social care as full partners. We will take these into our engagement with DHSC, NHS England, NICE, the MHRA and the devolved governments over the coming months.  There are three ways to get involved:  

 Thank you to all our speakers, chairs and panellists, to Capgemini as headline sponsor and Mills & Reeve as panel sponsor, to our Health and Social Care Council and Working Groups, and to techUK's events team for a fantastic day.  

For more information on techUK's Health and Social Care programme, contact Rachel Kennedy, Head of Health and Social Care.