Penetrating the National Health Service and private sectors

摘要

The National Health Service (NHS) is an enormous entity and is very expensive to run, with almost as many staff as the Chinese army has soldiers. However, navigating the NHS innovation landscape is not so much hard as complicated. Technology innovation – from medicines management, through capacity monitoring systems, to surgical robots – is less common and more difficult to deploy. At their core, technology innovations in healthcare usually have three things in common: intellectual property that is in some way protectable, the capability to generate revenue and most importantly capacity to improve health. Innovations may also be either ‘sustaining’ or ‘disruptive’. The former are the sort of thing we expect from large companies: the incremental year-on-year improvements that do not create new markets but sustain, and in some cases develop, an existing one. Prehabilitation is a relatively new concept rapidly gaining acceptance across the global medical community.