I'm delighted to be here with you all today at our annual Health Tech Summit in collaboration with London Tech Week.
As you will have heard from the Prime Minister earlier today, this government has a clear mission - to make the UK the most innovative economy in the world. The UK tech industry is one of the engines for economic growth and a clear representation of our plan to cement the UK's status as a Science and Technology 'Superpower' by 2030.
Last year, the UK became just the third country in the world to have a tech sector valued at $1 trillion. It is the biggest in Europe by some distance and behind only the US and China globally.
I want to illustrate my passion about the role of innovation and technology in improving the health of our nation, and how I've seen the power they hold first-hand. During my role as ITV Strategy Director, I discovered the power of innovation during the transition from analogue to digital TV while pioneering the move to Freeview.
I later moved into healthcare where the company I set up significantly reduced the waiting time for PCR results from 72 hours down to just 3 or 4 hours. It was at this point I also experienced first-hand the challenges of doing business with the NHS, so I sympathise wholeheartedly with anyone who's struggled in that regard and am committed to removing barriers and ensuring our health service remains on the frontline of innovation.
Today I'd like to talk to you about how government is supporting innovation and the adoption of digital health technologies, offering significant opportunities to transform the way we deliver access to health and care, with some substantial investment and activity to boost the range of technologies available for adoption across the NHS.
As we all know, the NHS is under increasing pressure.
This is arising from increasing demand, an ageing population, and co-morbidities to name a few factors. At the same time, healthcare expenditure represented around 12 per cent of GDP in 2021. This cost to our economy is only set to increase in future years and we have a real challenge to ensure that the NHS is sustainable.
Digital and technology is one major way that we will address some of the challenges that face the NHS. We know that digitally mature trusts operate with approximately 10 per cent improved efficiency compared with their less digitally mature peers.
We are exploring new technologies which it would be useful for the NHS to adopt and we're working collaboratively across a range of areas to support companies develop and deploy digital health-technologies and I'd like to share some examples with you.
The Small Business Research Initiative Healthcare award programme supports innovators and entrepreneurs. As of 2022/23, the programme has made cumulative investments of over £129 million and has funded a total of 324 projects.
The Digital Health Partnership Award has funded 43 NHS projects identified as novel, with the potential to scale at pace. The technologies are focused on supporting people at home and over 140,000 patients have been supported in under two years.
Innovate UK provides funding to UK-based businesses or research organisations to support and stimulate innovation in the UK economy, offering grants of between £25,000 and £10 million and innovation loans of between £100,000 and £1 million.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research works with industry at all stages of the clinical development pipeline. Funding is available to support promising innovations to generate the evidence needed to get to market.
We've provided £123 million to test and evaluate 86 AI technologies in areas such as urgent stroke care, home testing for disease and cancer screening. These technologies are being deployed and scaled across 99 hospitals, and 300 primary care networks in the UK.
We're working on coordinating these investment programmes and evidencing the impact for scale across the NHS - I will return to this point a little later.
As well as the excellent technologies which currently exist, we continue to identify new opportunities to support innovation that can be scaled at a national level. I am excited to share
