How to find the right evidence
to scale NHS health innovation

UK health innovation pilots give us more than enough data, but actionable insight can be harder to find.

Projects often conclude with a dashboard of success metrics: user satisfaction scores, app downloads, on-time technical deployment and so on.  Yet too few pilots reach adoption at scale So what’s causing the bottleneck?

The 10 Year Health Planmandates three critical shifts: from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. To break the cycle of “pilot purgatory,” Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and Trust leaders must often ignore the noise of activity metrics and find the signals of systemic value in these three contexts.

What to Look For

When reviewing an evaluation report or a business case for a new technology, not all data points are created equal. To determine if an innovation is ready for scale, look for three specific indicators of value.

1. Released Capacity

The most common trap in evaluation is measuring “time saved per task” in a vacuum. Let’s say a dashboard shows a tool savings two minutes per patient interaction on average. That’s a worthwhile saving, but only if the time isn’t consumed other administrative inefficiencies.

The BMA reported in 2022 that clinicians were losing over 13.5 million hours a yearto inadequate or malfunctioning IT systems. And in 2024, more than half of BMA members felt their workplace’s EHR or operating system was not fit for purpose. So if we add another tool that saves theoretical time but creates workflow friction, we’re only compounding the problem.

The solution is to look for evaluations that map process changes to released workforce capacity. The Health Innovation East Midlands 2024-25 Impact Report, for example, which explicitly tracked 15,918 clinical NHS appointments saved through adoption of innovation — a metric that represents actual capacity created.

2. Economic vs. Theoretical Savings

Business cases are often built on avoided costs – “X admissions were prevented, saving the Trust £X.” While important for long-term population health, these cost savings are often theoretical — they rarely return funds to this year’s budget.

The Department of Health and Social Care’s MedTech Strategyhas rightly shifted focus towards a “value-based procurement methodology” to ensure the NHS gets the right product at the right price.

This means we need to prioritise evidence of Unit Cost Reduction and measurable ROI, like that seen in a recent regional evaluation of a secure digital pathway platform (page 17),which demonstrated a benefit of £1.30 for every £1 of NHS funding spent on specific platforms.

In a resource-constrained environment, innovations that deliver “cashable” savings or direct operational efficiency will always have a smoother path to scale than those promising hypothetical future gains.

3. Implementation Fidelity

Many evaluations focus on a tool’s technical performance — algorithm accuracy, uptime, or speed. But the greatest barrier to scaling is rarely the technology; it’s the organisational friction.

A March 2025 report by UCLPartners and The Health Foundationfound that AI adoption in London remains “fragmented” and stuck in pilot phases, largely due to infrastructure and governance barriers rather than the tech itself.

To help address this challenge, researchers from Imperial College Londonhave recently argued for a “modular evaluation” approach for the NICE Evidence Standards Framework (ESF), allowing for dynamic assessment that tracks how a tool performs in the messy reality of clinical workflows, as well as regulatory sandboxes, shared data repositories and real-world evidence strategies.

The Future Care Capital Approach

When designed with clarity and proportion, evaluation becomes a strategic tool: lightweight enough to fit daily practice, rigorous enough to earn trust, and transparent enough to drive scale.

If you’re planning or delivering an innovation programme, we’d love to explore how an evaluation like this could help you learn and adapt. Get in touch with Andy Jones at andy@futurecarecapital.org.uk.