Priorities for supporting health care innovation: an analysis of funding programmes in England

Innovation in health care can bring real benefits to patients, staff and the UK economy. Given current pressures facing the NHS, it is more critical than ever that these benefits are realised. The recent review of the UK’s innovation ecosystem by Roland Sinker set out that ‘without embracing innovation, we put at risk having a sustainable health care system that meets the needs of our population’.

An important part of the health care innovation ecosystem is the landscape of public sector funding and support. In 2021 we conducted a review of this landscape, capturing a snapshot of public sector activity supporting the development and use of innovation in England’s NHS. 4 years on, we have updated this work to reflect the 2025 landscape, to explore if things are changing, and if the observations we made in 2021 still apply.

Specifically, we reviewed a wide range of innovation-related programmes run by government and public sector bodies in England (Box 1). We identified 62 distinct initiatives offering funding or support for health care innovation. In each case, we examined the type of activity supported, the programme focus and budget, whether the programme offered funding and to whom, and the stage(s) of the innovation cycle supported. While we cannot claim our mapping is comprehensive, we are confident it covers many of the organisations and programmes of interest – and a sufficient volume to identify important patterns and trends. 

To provide a fuller picture,this blog should be read alongside our 2021 analysis. Since then, the NHS has undergone several organisational changes that have had a bearing on support for innovation, including the absorption of NHS Digital and NHSX into NHS England, and more recently the announcement that NHS England will be abolished. Despite these changes, there has been a continuous emphasis on the important role innovation can play in supporting the NHS to meet current challenges, and innovation will no doubt feature strongly in the forthcoming 10-Year Health Plan. 

So how, if at all, has the health innovation landscape changed since 2021? This blog sets out our key findings and reflections. 

Adoption still loses out

While it is important to have a strong innovation pipeline, the ultimate goal is to bring impact to patients and staff at scale. The adoption of proven innovations should therefore be a critical area of focus. Successful adoption takes significant time and effort – especially when it comes to the kinds of complex innovations often needed for health care service transformation and improvement.

Elsewhere, we have argued that underestimating what’s needed for successful adoption has resulted in a historic imbalance towards funding research, development and early-stage innovation at the expense of the later stages of the innovation pipeline. The result is plain to see: an NHS awash with promising innovations, accompanied by ever-present frustration that they aren’t being widely adopted.

However, this may be gradually starting to change. Of the 31 national innovation programmes we identified as offering funding in 2021, only 13% were dedicated to supporting adoption (with the vast majority offering support for innovators only, and a few offering support for both innovation and adoption). Of the 37 programmes we identified as offering funding in 2025, 19% were dedicated to adoption. This includes programmes such as NHS England’s Pathway Transformation Fund and the Rapid Uptake Products programme run by the Accelerated Access Collaborative. 

So, while the emphasis is still firmly towards supporting innovators, there seems to be some modest rebalancing underway. This is welcome, but to really reap the benefits of innovation, the NHS will need to further increase its focus on adoption, ensuring that health care organisations have the resources and capability to implement and embed innovations effectively. And beyond the specific programmes reviewed here, it will be critical to continue support for adoption more generally through NHS bodies such as Health Innovation Networks.

Evaluation remains a challenge

With a ‘vast, growing, and chaotic’ health tech innovation market, evaluation – particularly in real-world settings – is more important than ever. The NHS needs to know what works, what doesn’t and why, to ensure decisions about what innovations to procure are based on robust evidence. This includes evidence not just about care quality and safety, but about potential cost savings and productivity benefits too.

In the current financial context, policymakers, commissioners and organisational leaders are understandably placing significant emphasis on the business case for investment – wanting to know the potential scale and timeline of benefits before investing scarce resources.

Evaluation matters from a practical perspective too. Teams introducing innovations need to know how best to implement them and what will be required to make them work.

The evaluation of innovations remains a challenge, despite a helpful focus on real-world testing in the 2019 NHS Long Term Plan and the existence of valuable programmes such as NIHR's Invention for Innovation Challenge Awards and the Health Services and Delivery Research Programme. What’s particularly lacking is rapid evaluation to supply insights within the timescales often needed in fast-changing service environments.

In 2021 we found very few national programmes offering support specifically for rapid evaluation, and the picture in 2025 is not that different. Important initiatives certainly exist, notably the BRACE rapid evaluation centre and the Rapid Service Evaluation Team programme (both of which were renewed in 2023 for a further 5 years) and the DECIDE Centre – but the budgets for these dedicated initiatives are comparatively small (around £2m to £3m each).

Another emerging evaluation need is in relation to AI, which poses particular challenges. For example, the complex and adaptive nature of many AI algorithms means that conventional evaluation methods are often not suitable. There have been some important initiatives here in recent years; for example, the Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award included £113m over 4 years to accelerate the testing and evaluation of AI technologies in real-world settings. However, the closure of the NHS AI Lab in March 2025 leaves a considerable reduction in funding for the evaluation of AI, despite it being a priority technology for the UK government. 

Given the importance of evaluation for achieving the benefits of innovation, funding and support for evaluation capability remains a priority. Relatedly, while outside the scope of our research, it will also be important to ensure that organisations assessing and regulating technological innovations, including the MHRA and NICE, have sufficient capacity, capability and processes in place to make timely decisions informed by good evidence. This is becoming increasingly challenging given the growing volume and complexity of health tech products.

Clinical innovation still dominates 

Non-clinical innovations, such as technology to improve operational and administrative work, hold many potential gains for the NHS, including saving staff time or resources. They frequently have wide potential application across the NHS, helping with tasks that apply to many staff and organisations, and often carry less clinical risk, meaning fewer barriers to implementation. However, such technologies tend to carry less public and political appeal – it is the potential for significant medical breakthroughs from new technology that tends to capture our excitement. The result has been a strong focus on funding ‘cutting-edge’ clinical technologies, and the relative neglect of technologies supporting operational and administrative work.

Of the 75 programmes we identified in 2021, only two focused solely on non-clinical innovation, with the other 73 programmes focused either exclusively or primarily on clinical innovation. In 2025, non-clinical innovation continues to receive less attention and resources. Of the 62 programmes identified as directly supporting innovation (either through funding or other forms of support), only one focused explicitly on non-clinical innovation: the Connecting Care Records programme, which came to an end in March 2025. And although many programmes can support both clinical and non-clinical innovation (the NHS Innovation Accelerator, for example), looking across them as a whole a clinical focus tends to dominate. 

While funding clinical innovation is obviously important, if the government is to realise the much-needed productivity gains from innovation, focused support for innovators and adopters of non-clinical innovation will also be vital and valuable. 

The need for long-term planning and support

Another theme that emerges from our analysis is the need for long-term planning and support within the health care innovation landscape in England. The recent Innovation Ecosystem Programme called for a shift from a 1 or 2-year horizon, to planning as much as 10 years ahead. Yet many of the initiatives mapped through our research will be ending in 2025 and 2026, raising questions about what comes next.

The need for long-term support applies to the offers available within programmes, as well as the longevity of the underlying funding streams. Of the 37 programmes we identified as offering funding, we could find only five offering funding for up to 5 years, three of which will end by 2026 (though for several programmes no information was available on funding duration). The rest offered funding for shorter durations, sometimes for as little as 6 months. 

The forthcoming 10-Year Health Plan and Life Sciences Sector Strategy should provide a valuable opportunity for the government to inject more long-termism into how the health care innovation landscape is organised.

There will be other opportunities for improvement too. Given the large number of distinct programmes we identified, for the purposes of our analysis we have taken the number of programmes focusing on a particular area as a valid metric of the system’s interest in that area (while being mindful of the relative sizes of different programmes). But, of course, this is not to imply that a larger number of discrete programmes is the aim. While it may make sense to have discrete programmes and initiatives where there are genuinely different objectives involved, there are certainly elements of duplication and overlap across the system that could benefit from consolidation. Previous innovation reviews have observed that such consolidation could bring clarity and improve access to support. 

Conclusion

The fact that many of the initiatives mapped through our research will be ending in 2025 and 2026, together with the abolition of NHS England (which leads a substantial portion of innovation activity), risks a significant loss of support for health care innovation. It is therefore critical that the 10-Year Health Plan and Life Sciences Sector Strategy renew public sector support for health care innovation, as well as taking the opportunity to improve the design of the ecosystem. The new R&D Missions Accelerator Programme and AI Adoption Fund, announced in the recent Spending Review, could become important sources of funding in future, though it is currently unclear to what extent these initiatives will support health innovation.

In 2021 we described a ‘complex patchwork of programmes’ that ‘didn’t necessarily reflect an intentional design’. By revisiting and updating our analysis in 2025, we find this is still the case. Specifically, our research suggests that there is a need to:

• increase support available for the adoption of innovation
• expand capacity for the rapid evaluation of innovation, and the evaluation of AI in health care
• create a stronger focus on non-clinical innovations
• ensure long-term sources of support are available for innovation.

By taking action to address the gaps and imbalances in this landscape of funding and support, policymakers can ensure the UK’s innovation ecosystem is better placed to act as a catalyst for the changes the health care system so badly needs.