The COVID conundrum: medtech innovation

The emergence of COVID-19 has forced rapid change upon global healthcare delivery and the NHS has proven that it can rapidly adapt and innovate. Alice Greenhalgh, innovations manager, Health Enterprise East (HEE), discusses the challenges and opportunities for medtech development in the wake of the pandemic.

Innovation is pivotal in many industries such as healthcare, defence, and agriculture. Innovators from such industries, that have not worked with the NHS before, often assume that being one of the largest, unified healthcare systems in the world, innovation is not only embedded into the NHS ecosystem, but actively encouraged. However, if there is a place in healthcare to innovate and improve at scale, the NHS should surely be the poster child. Over the past decade, the NHS ecosystem has improved greatly, with dedicated staff and funding now set aside for innovation.

Some would argue, however, that the pace and scale at which innovative new medical technologies have been adopted within the NHS has been too slow and cumbersome in the past. The speed and consistency of the NHS switching to electronic patient records for instance, along with the outdated use of pagers, has often been cited as evidence of the slow pace of change.