What is the future of UK healthtech?

There are few indus­tries that can lay claim to touch­ing the lives of every­one, yet healthtech is one of them.

With more than half a mil­lion dif­fer­ent prod­ucts, we will all inter­act with healthtech, with­in our own home, GP surg­eries, hos­pi­tals or care facil­i­ties.

The prod­ucts, tech­nolo­gies and ser­vices are both var­ied and dynam­ic; from med­ical devices, includ­ing pace­mak­ers, sur­gi­cal instru­ments and infu­sion pumps, and diag­nos­tic tools, such as tests for infec­tious dis­ease and MRI scan­ners, to emerg­ing dig­i­tal­ly enabled tech­nolo­gies, robot­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI).

Healthtech is inte­gral to the deliv­ery of mod­ern health­care, enabling clin­i­cians to pro­vide improved patient out­comes in a safe and effec­tive man­ner for the NHS.

As the largest employ­er with­in UK life sci­ences, this diverse indus­try is made up of 127,400 peo­ple work­ing across 3,860 busi­ness­es, who col­lec­tive­ly gen­er­ate a turnover of £24 bil­lion.

Careful regulation of healthtech is crucial

Healthtech prod­ucts are high­ly reg­u­lat­ed. To enter the mar­ket, they must demon­strate robust qual­i­ty, safe­ty and per­for­mance attrib­ut­es that clear­ly prove their ben­e­fit out­weighs the risk involved in their use. They are then con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tored dur­ing their life cycle to ensure their long-term safe­ty.

The iter­a­tive nature of the way such prod­ucts are devel­oped, and their poten­tial to be tru­ly dis­rup­tive to care path­ways, means that a unique, nim­ble approach to approval and intro­duc­tion into the NHS is need­ed.

Reg­u­la­tion has bal­anced risk and ben­e­fit and has led to the intro­duc­tion of tech­nolo­gies that many of us now take for grant­ed, such as joint replace­ments. The col­lec­tion of high-qual­i­ty data has been cru­cial in mon­i­tor­ing their safe­ty per­for­mance, with ini­tia­tives like the Nation­al Joint Reg­istry demon­strat­ing how use­ful data col­lec­tion sys­tems can be.

Reg­istries enable both indus­try and the clin­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty to col­lab­o­rate pos­i­tive­ly via an agreed frame­work, mon­i­tor­ing and assess­ing the per­for­mance of devices in a real-world set­ting.

In ensur­ing the con­tin­ued safe­ty of all healthtech prod­ucts, reg­istries are like­ly to be a promi­nent fea­ture of future health­care dis­cus­sions and the healthtech indus­try looks for­ward to sup­port­ing such efforts.

How Brexit will impact healthtech

How this work fits into the wider reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work is also impor­tant. The UK cur­rent­ly belongs to a Euro­pean-wide sys­tem, which will end when the post-Brex­it tran­si­tion peri­od con­cludes on Decem­ber 31, 2020.

In line with the government’s desire to devel­op a more sov­er­eign reg­u­la­to­ry regime, there are oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­sid­er oth­er poten­tial process­es in the long term.

Data com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the Euro­pean sys­tem would make sense, as a wider pop­u­la­tion pool sig­nif­i­cant­ly helps to mon­i­tor safe­ty trends. That said, a more bespoke sys­tem could also enable greater con­sis­ten­cy with inter­na­tion­al require­ments, mir­ror­ing a trend towards glob­al har­mon­i­sa­tion of reg­u­la­tions.

Inter­ac­tive, patient-focused reg­u­la­tions can also sup­port emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies such as AI, where sys­tems con­tin­ue to learn and refine once they are in clin­i­cal use and col­lect­ing new data. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the UK to work towards and excel in.

Well-craft­ed reg­u­la­tions can ensure both con­tin­ued patient safe­ty and the demands of future tech­nol­o­gy-led health­care deliv­ery. The UK has the chance to be a glob­al leader in this vital work.

For us to suc­ceed, it is impor­tant to con­tin­ue this pub­lic dis­course about the bal­ance of risk and ben­e­fits asso­ci­at­ed with the med­ical treat­ments from which so many of us ben­e­fit.

Careful regulation of healthtech is crucial

How Brexit will impact healthtech