Medical Equipment: Technology
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many medical technologies were (a) piloted in the NHS in (i) 2023 and (ii) 2024, (b) supported after successful pilots in those years and (c) adopted at scale in the last year.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne
In February 2023, the Department published its first ever strategy for MedTech, as well as a one year on update in April 2024, outlining our priorities for improving the adoption and spread of safe, effective, and innovative medical technologies across the National Health Service.
NHS England holds data on innovation adoption and scale for specific NHS England programmes and policies, such as the MedTech Funding Mandate programme. Providing data on individual programmes in response to this question does not provide a complete picture of activity.
For example, the Health Tech Adoption and Acceleration Fund will have funded a mixture of pilots and scaling of existing programmes, however this was largely managed at local level, and NHS England do not centrally hold data on what is a pilot and what is a scaled programme.
Pilot and evaluation data is held at provider level, which includes acute, primary, community, and secondary care providers. These organisations are not required to report pilot outcomes to NHS England. They work autonomously but in partnership with technology evaluators, academics, researchers, or other expert partners such as the Health Innovation Networks. NHS England produces an annual Health Innovation Network report, which is due to come out this Autumn. The 2022/23 is available at the following link:
The data is aggregated, so it is not possible to extrapolate from the report how many of the projects are technology pilots.
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