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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
2025 has marked an important year for the UK healthtech landscape – defined less by headlines and more by steady, meaningful progress. Across the NHS, trusts have taken steps to advance scanning programmes, accelerate paper retirement, consolidate electronic patient record (EPR) estates, and, in many cases, achieve their highest level of digital maturity yet.
The Chancellor’s recent Budget announcement of £300 million investment in technology to improve patient services reinforces this momentum, with clear political commitment to digital tools that drive operational efficiency. Furthermore, there is a growing recognition that the real opportunity no longer lies in simply digitising information – it is instead in making the data genuinely fit for purpose at the point of care, where it matters most.
Meanwhile, the wider policy environment began to shift. The NHS’s 10 Year Health Plan for England set out an ambitious and largely well-received vision for a more connected, data-driven system. Trusts are waiting to see how that vision will translate into clear guidance, funding flows, and delivery expectations at the Integrated Care Board (ICB) and organisational level. It will be particularly interesting to note how the plan, alongside newly introduced legislation like the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, laid in parliament in November to protect Britain’s essential public services, will affect the IT landscape within the NHS.
Throughout the year, AI discussions matured, interoperability rose to board agendas, and workforce pressures sharpened the focus on technologies that reduce cognitive load, rather than add to it. These are the shifts that point to a clearer direction for 2026, as leaders now consider how to turn digital progress into faster decisions, smoother pathways, and better outcomes for patients.
Our healthcare service continues to balance digitisation ambitions with the day-to-day realities of simply keeping services running. But digitisation alone is no longer enough. Many trusts have made admirable progress in retiring paper and consolidating clinical systems, yet these advances haven’t broken the cycle of what defines much of the NHS workforce experience. Staff shortages and admin-heavy manual processes drive a compounding cycle in healthcare. There is not enough time to complete essential tasks, which creates more backlog and delayed diagnoses, illness progression, and, ultimately, greater workload, cost, and system strain.
Digitising information doesn’t automatically fix this problem, particularly when a significant proportion of clinical content remains unstructured, fragmented across systems, and difficult to retrieve at the point of care. As workforce pressures intensify, with fewer staff attempting to manage volumes of increasingly complex work, trusts are being forced to prioritise technologies that take the load away from clinicians – supported by stronger AI governance and a continued ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach. Tools that summarise, surface, and contextualise information will be essential to breaking the cycle and enabling clinicians to act quickly and confidently.
Earlier this year, a landmark NHS trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot, across 90 organisations and more than 30,000 staff, demonstrated just how far AI has moved from its initial hype to practical value. The results were compelling and indicated average daily time savings of around 43 minutes per person, which the government estimates could equate to 400,000 hours saved every month if deployed widely. The trial marks a clear shift in how AI can directly relieve pressure on a workforce already stretched to its limits. However, the real opportunity extends beyond isolated productivity wins, and this is where healthcare’s attention now needs to be.
The year has brought widespread recognition that the NHS must embrace AI – but with discipline. There is now greater emphasis on governance and assurance, and a shared understanding that AI should never be deployed purely for innovation’s sake. There is a risk of trusts adopting multiple, uncoordinated AI tools and, without careful oversight, the system could easily recreate the fragmented, siloed ICT estates it has worked hard to move beyond. In response, many organisations are establishing centralised AI teams to evaluate solutions and ensure AI capabilities are embedded coherently and meaningfully rather than reactively.
In 2026, it is crucial that any AI usage in trusts maintains a ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach. Its role is not to simply automate tasks, but to strengthen each step of the patient journey by ensuring clinicians have the right level and quality of information at exactly the right moment. Too often, patients are pushed back in the queue, and not because of clinical complexity, but because key information is missing or unclear. AI can play a key role by checking the completeness and accuracy of information, while aligning it with NHS guidelines and surfacing the most important details so cases can move forward rather than pause or reset.
Achieving this requires systematic workflow transformation, supported by high-quality digital data and augmented by intelligent tools. Utilised in this way, AI can help drive down waiting times, reduce workload, and improve patient outcomes, while giving clinicians more confidence and time to focus on care.
Although interoperability has been talked about for a long time, this year it finally rose to board-level discussions. The consequences of siloed information are manifesting on the frontline of care – delays in receiving records, inconsistent data across acute and community services, and fragmented patient pathways have all brought to the fore that disconnected systems are much more than an ‘IT problem’. As a result, boards are now seeing that, without seamless information flow, it is impossible to deliver truly joined-up care.
A clear shift this year has been a change in mindset from organisational to regional interoperability. Integrated care system (ICS)-level collaboration continues to strengthen, as trusts begin to plan digital strategy not as individual hospitals but as part of a wider, interdependent ecosystem. Suppliers must recognise the regional implications of their solutions, as we move into a space where it is no longer enough for a system to work well within one organisation if it hinders data movement across the wider care landscape.
As we approach 2026, the focus for the NHS must shift from ‘access’ to ‘insight’. The digital foundations that were once lacking have been laid – trusts are scanning records, consolidating systems, and working under more mature data governance. Now, the focus must be on turning that data into meaningful, contextual information that facilitates clinical decision-making and can be surfaced instantly.
AI-driven summarisation, intelligent retrieval, and context-aware insights will pave the way for reduced and efficient workloads and greater clarity at the point of care. Importantly, as the novelty and hype of AI subsides to make way for purposeful progress, its success will be increasingly judged on outcomes rather than capability – for example, its impact on backlogs, workflow, patient throughput, and patient experiences. Boards will expect proof of value, supported by more rigorous validation frameworks, to ensure the right AI solution is implemented in a cohesive and carefully considered IT strategy and will be genuinely beneficial.
Meanwhile, as interoperability continues to rise as a priority, there will be increased opportunity for vendors to support regional information sharing. 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for the healthtech landscape because of all these reasons. The foundations for digital transformation are finally in place, but operational transformation will only happen if data can move, connect, and work harder for frontline teams. Technology will always be essential, but so will the operational backbone that, ultimately, ensures the right information reaches the right person at the right moment. If our healthcare system – and all its suppliers and supporters – can achieve this, 2026 could mark one of the most significant leaps in NHS digital maturity to date.
