Can AI Really Improve the NHS? 3 Healthtech Leaders Weigh In

The UK’s National Healthcare Service has 7.2 million people on its waiting list and 99,800 of those have been waiting for over a year to be seen by a doctor, according to NHS data from April 2026. 

This crisis is compounded by inefficiencies at every stage of care: heavy clinical paperwork burdens, severe backlogs in diagnostic imaging, and an over-reliance on centralised hospital settings for complex drug delivery. 

To explore how technology can alleviate these pressures, we hosted a roundtable discussion featuring three industry pioneers. 

The panel includes Dr. Lizzie Tuckey, UK Managing Director at Scan.com, a tech-enabled diagnostics platform; Dr. Katie Baker, Director for UK & Ireland at Tandem Health, an AI medical assistant and ambient scribe; and Dr. Katie King, Founder and CEO at BioOrbit, a biotechnology startup. 

Together, they discuss how AI, automation and space-based manufacturing are modernising patient pathways and clinician workflows. 

From your unique vantage points – diagnostics, clinical documentation and drug manufacturing – what is the biggest hurdle your sector has cleared to make AI a reality for patients today?

Dr. Tuckey: The biggest hurdle hasn’t been the technology - it’s been changing how healthcare operates around it. The AI models and engineering capabilities already exist. The real challenge has been building teams who can look at entrenched clinical workflows and ask ‘How do we actually fix this?’ – not just layer tech on top of the same broken process. That’s not happening at scale in NHS trusts or large legacy healthcare providers today.

For Scan.com, that means clinicians and product teams working closely together to solve practical problems across the entire imaging pathway. One example is how we use AI to review radiology reports for high-risk keywords and urgent findings. Radiologists are working under immense pressure, and AI can provide an additional layer of support by helping surface cases that may need faster attention. It’s not about replacing clinical judgement – it’s about reinforcing it. We’ve already identified more than 20 cases where that second check mattered. 

Dr. Baker: Regulation is a hurdle, but it’s the hurdle we want to be facing and one we’re proud to lead on overcoming. There can’t be shortcuts, particularly in healthcare. We are focused on how to build clinically safe AI systems and enable monitoring post deployment in this new technological era. 

Patient trust is the next one, and it still has to be earned every day. Patients are reporting more human care when having Tandem present, which shows that AI is a reality for patients already.

Dr. King: The biggest hurdle has been proving that these technologies can move beyond the lab and deliver tangible benefits in the real world. Healthcare doesn’t adopt innovation simply because it's novel; it adopts innovation when it improves outcomes. We’re now reaching an inflection point where technologies that once felt experimental are solving genuine clinical challenges at scale. 

At BioOrbit, we’ve demonstrated that we can manufacture drugs in microgravity at an industrial scale, potentially transforming how some of the world's most important medicines for cancer treatment are delivered. The broader lesson is that breakthrough technology becomes a reality when it solves a problem patients and healthcare systems have struggled with for decades.

As we develop high-tech solutions like microgravity-manufactured drugs or rapid AI-driven diagnostics, how do we ensure these don’t exacerbate a two-tier healthcare system?

Dr. Tuckey: As someone who trained in the NHS, this is one of the most important questions. The honest answer is that private diagnostics could widen inequality if implemented poorly. But used effectively, technology can improve access to healthcare for everyone, supporting earlier diagnosis. AI works best when it makes healthcare more efficient, speeds up diagnosis, and frees up resources across the whole system.

Dr. Baker: Today the conversation is about individual tools and technologies. Tomorrow it has to be about systems. And when you move into systems thinking, the NHS takes an advantage: it is uniquely placed to do systems thinking because it’s one population, one infrastructure and one standard at scale. That’s a levelling power that will enable the NHS to keep pace.

Dr. King: The most important question isn’t whether technology is advanced - it’s who benefits from it. Some of the most exciting innovations in healthcare are actually those that improve access to care and treatment pathways. At BioOrbit, we’re enabling pharmaceutical drugs to be manufactured in space, at scale, for the first time in history, to solve a very human problem on Earth. 

Today, cancer treatments require repeated hospital visits and specialist drug administration. If we can enable patients to self-administer those treatments at home, via injectables like we do with diabetes, we’re not creating exclusivity; we’re removing barriers and improving healthcare outcomes. 

How can your specific technology actually help close the gap between the NHS and private care?

Dr. Tuckey: The real value of AI in diagnostics is operational. Better scheduling, faster imaging workflows and improved scanner utilisation mean more patients can be seen at a lower cost per scan. Across the Scan.com network, we’ve seen imaging providers increase scanner utilisation by up to 50%, helping reduce delays and improve access to care.

Dr. Baker: If you take Tandem, we’re currently in more than NHS trusts and across 97% of primary care in the UK. Deploying across the NHS allows patients from any background to receive AI-enabled care, democratising it in a way that no private health network can match.

Dr. King: One of the biggest differentiators between public and private healthcare is convenience. Patients often don’t want different treatments – they want easier access to the same treatments. Today, around 70% of the world’s highest-grossing drugs are administered intravenously in clinical settings, creating a significant burden on healthcare systems. 

Our technology has the potential to shift many of those therapies from hospital wards into people's homes. That means fewer appointments, reduced pressure on care capacity and a more patient-centred experience. Ultimately, we’re working towards a future where the quality of treatment isn’t determined by where it's delivered.

With patients increasingly using AI for self-diagnosis and clinicians using it for note-taking, where does the line of human-in-the-loop sit?

Dr. Tuckey: To me, speed and safety aren’t competing priorities. The key distinction is whether you treat AI as a decision-maker or decision-supporter. We firmly believe it should be the latter. At Scan.com, AI helps surface information, prioritise risk, and streamline workflows, but clinicians remain responsible for decisions and patient care from triage through to treatment.

Dr. Baker: As I see it, the clinician and the patient always have to be the decision-makers. AI does the admin, not the medicine. 

Dr. King: Healthcare will always require human judgement. AI can help people find information faster and help clinicians spend less time on administration, but trust, empathy and accountability remain fundamentally human responsibilities. The future isn’t AI replacing clinicians – it’s clinicians becoming more effective because technology removes friction from their work. The same principle applies across health innovation. 

At BioOrbit, we are using microgravity in space to unlock new drug formulations, but every breakthrough still needs to pass through rigorous scientific validation, clinical testing and regulatory oversight. 

How are you navigating the delicate balance between using AI’s speed and maintaining the gold standard of patient data security and clinical safety?

Dr. Tuckey: Data security is equally critical. Patients are sharing highly sensitive or personal information, so trust and governance have to be foundational. Being clinically-led shapes how we approach both safety and data protection.

Dr. Baker: If AI isn’t safe it will not make things faster. That’s why I don’t see compliance as a brake on speed; it’s what makes speed safe. And data sovereignty is completely non-negotiable: our systems are built for NHS standards from day one, not retrofitted.

Dr. King: Healthcare has a higher bar than almost any other industry. Innovation only matters if patients and clinicians trust it. That’s why safety, quality and regulatory compliance have to be built into technologies from the outset rather than added later. One of the most encouraging developments in the UK has been the willingness of regulators such as the MHRA to engage proactively with emerging technologies and organisations including the UKSA and the European Space Agency. We’re already working with the NHS, MHRA, the Regulatory Innovation Office, and Civil Aviation Authority to establish pathways for pharmaceutical manufacturing in space. Innovation should move quickly, but trust is what ultimately enables adoption, and we can’t do that without government and regulatory oversight. 

If we fast-forward five years, how will the standard patient journey have changed because of your work?

Dr. Tuckey: The UK faces significant challenges in imaging capacity, and delays in diagnosis can have a major impact on patient outcomes. The UK has one of the lowest numbers of scanners per capita among developed countries, alongside comparatively poor cancer survival rates relative to countries like Australia, Canada and Norway. Those issues are closely linked. 

Over the next five years, we hope to help create a patient experience where imaging is faster, clearer and better integrated with the wider healthcare system. Instead of waiting 6-12 weeks for a scan, patients should be able to access diagnostics quickly, receive understandable results, and ensure urgent findings are escalated promptly. For some of our patients, getting a scan within 48 hours has meant catching something early enough to change the outcome. Early diagnosis isn’t just a clinical metric – it’s the difference between a manageable condition and a devastating one.

Dr. Baker: The picture I’d paint is a clinician who finishes their shift on time, looking at the patient, not the screen. Today, NHS clinicians lose up to 40% of their time to admin. In five years, if not sooner, we’ve got to give them that time back. If I think about the specifics, in five years I expect AI will be the invisible infrastructure behind every NHS consultation. 

Patients won’t have to repeat their story five times across different systems, because the AI will have captured it in a structured data format as the foundation, available across the system. That means patients get to the right care, quicker and clinicians can spend more time on care. 

Dr. King: I think we’ll look back and wonder why so many treatments required hospital visits in the first place. The patient journey is steadily moving away from centralised care and towards treatment that fits around people’s lives. 

Our vision is that therapies which currently require lengthy hospital infusions can instead be administered through simple injections at home. For patients, that means fewer disruptions, less travel, and greater independence. For healthcare systems, it means lower costs and more capacity. The manufacturing of these drugs may happen in orbit, but the impact will be felt in living rooms, pharmacies and communities across the world.

Can you share a specific vision or customer story that illustrates how your technology is already starting to transform a patient’s life or a clinician’s workday?

Dr. Tuckey: Longer term, the opportunity is to make efficient, technology-enabled diagnostics more accessible at scale. The goal is a system where faster access to imaging isn’t seen as a premium service, but as a standard part of modern healthcare for the many, not the few.

Dr. Baker: AI will run across the whole patient journey, optimising structured data for the best outcomes - both for the health system and for patients themselves.

Dr. King: We’re still in the early stages of commercial deployment, but the patient impact we're working towards is incredibly clear. Imagine someone undergoing cancer treatment who currently has to organise their life around regular hospital visits, long appointments, and hours spent receiving intravenous therapies. 

Our ambition is to help turn many of those treatments into self-administered injections that can be taken at home. That doesn’t just improve convenience – it gives patients back time, flexibility and control at a moment when they often feel they have very little. That’s what excites me most: using frontier technology to make healthcare feel more human.