The government’s Ten-Year Health Plan places technology at the heart of NHS modernisation, identifying AI, data, wearables, genomics and robotics as critical enablers.
The language is deliberately bold: the plan frames these as “big bets”, an unusual term for a service that has traditionally prized predictability. However, the accumulated pressures of rising demand, workforce constraints and ageing infrastructure make how this all plays out anything but predictable.
In early March 2026, the New Statesman held a roundtable in partnership with Medtronic to explore what it will take to turn that ambition into practice. Policymakers, clinicians, patient representatives and industry leaders came together to discuss how digital technologies can be developed and deployed to improve outcomes, experience and efficiency – for patients and for the people who care for them.
The discussion was held under Chatham House rules, meaning individuals and organisations are not named. It has been summarised for length and clarity.
The discussion began with a provocation. There is, one industry speaker argued, a widening gap between the technology people use in their everyday lives and what is available on the front line of the NHS.
Clinicians workplaces still shaped by slow logins, fragmented systems and outdated processes. “We have extraordinary people in our public services in the NHS,” they said, “but often they’re doing their job in spite of technology, not because of it.”
Examples were aplenty. One policymaker noted that the debate about health technology too often focuses on what it does for the patient, without considering how it supports the clinician. They gave the example of appointment booking systems that remain frustratingly rigid, a problem that ultimately falls back on patients.
Another pointed out that some of the most basic infrastructure is still not in place: decent wi-fi is not universally available in GP surgeries, for example. Several participants argued that before the NHS can meaningfully embrace AI, it must get its digital foundations right first.
Yet, the foundations are not all missing. The UK’s centralised health system holds an extraordinary volume of data, which many attendees claimed to be a genuine asset by international standards. One participant noted that GPs are already using AI-driven tools to triage patients through online questionnaires, and that the appetite for innovation at a local level is real.
However, a major barrier is connectivity. Clinicians still cannot access most of the information held elsewhere in the system that would make their work more efficient. “There’s a real barrier that we just have to get rid of. We must have a unified system,” one clinician observed.
This was echoed across the roundtable. One industry representative remarked: “Although the NHS is incredibly data-rich, I would argue that it’s knowledge-poor,” explaining that fragmented systems and poor usability mean the potential for learning at scale has never been realised.
Clinicians themselves identify the poor usability of current tools as the primary barrier to greater use of AI – not a lack of ambition, but a lack of workable systems. Building what one person described as genuine “learning health systems” will require not just better data, but better infrastructure to use it.
If the NHS’s data is to become the engine of transformation, the room was clear that trust must also be at the forefront of the discussion. One participant warned that healthcare data can often carry bias – whether based on ethnicity, gender or geography – and that automating flawed processes could risk embedding those biases more deeply. “Once we automate those biases, it’s going to be even more difficult to backtrack, to say this is how you came to this conclusion,” they said. The call was for rigorous work to understand and address bias before systems are deployed at scale.
To establish this trust, there was broad agreement that digital transformation must be done with patients, not to them, and with clinicians, not around them. “If technology is not co-produced with patients and doctors within the system, it will never get adopted,” one participant observed. “It will never get scaled. It will never even get in the front door.”
Several voices stressed that patient groups and front-line staff must be meaningfully involved in the design and governance of new technologies, not consulted as an afterthought.
Another recurring theme was the challenge of scale. “There’s no shortage of innovation happening in the NHS,” said one industry representative, but the system’s capacity to adopt new technologies beyond individual trusts or regions remains severely limited. One participant responded that the health service has too many pilots that never progress – “pockets of excellence that fail to become standard practice”.
The ambition, they said, must shift from running individual pilots to creating replicable patterns that can be adopted across the whole system. Without that shift, resources are spent on small-scale wins that never reach a “critical mass” of patients.
Part of the solution, several attendees argued, lies in how partnerships between the public and private sectors are structured. The NHS already relies on private technology, so the question is not whether to partner, but how to do it better. One participant called for clearer expectations around what “responsible and ethical profitability” looks like, so that companies entering this space understand the guard rails from the outset.
If the process, patient involvement and benefit can be clearly demonstrated, the model can work. “We need to make sure that if we spend money, it’s really well spent,” observed one participant.
One of the most striking parts of the roundtable was when the discussion turned to patients themselves. Several in attendance challenged the assumption that the public is resistant to change or unrealistic in its expectations. “I think sometimes people are scared to talk to patients, because they think patients will say, ‘I want red roses every time I’m in hospital.’ They don’t. They know how the system works,” one clinician observed. Patients want to be genuine partners, to understand the risks in healthcare and in AI, and to have honest conversations about what is and isn’t possible.
There is already practical evidence of what this can look like. Work is under way, with consent, to use data at a local level to identify people at risk of falls and other health issues related to frailty.
When the purpose is clear and the benefit tangible, trust follows, the roundtable heard. “The public will trust if we work with them and start with that very basis of, ‘What is it you need to live your life to the full?’” one participant said. Another added that if systems are built around the needs of the people who use them – patients and clinicians alike – adoption will follow naturally.
Ultimately, the participants were all cautiously optimistic. The combination of political will, technological capability and clinical need creates a genuine window of opportunity. But that window will not stay open indefinitely.
The Ten-Year Plan must translate ambition into delivery – not through another generation of isolated pilots, but by a sustained commitment to building trusted, usable digital systems at scale.
The challenge, as one participant framed it, is to bring the same safety-first discipline that governs other high-stakes industries to the digital transformation of healthcare. What is needed is a common direction of travel: one that aligns the ambitions of policymakers with the realities of the front line; that builds in patient trust from the start; and that treats digital transformation not as a speculative bet, but as essential infrastructure for a health service fit for the future
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