Annual impact report 2025-26

Building a health innovation system that delivers

Over the past year, we have tested new innovations, scaled proven solutions and helped healthcare leaders plan for the future.

We’re proud of the impact that we’ve delivered across our partnership this year – from delivering AI risk assessment for deterioration to 400,000 patients, to piloting transformative dementia innovations, to rolling out life‑changing rapid cholesterol tests in local pharmacies, and much more.

This year, we have played an active role in strengthening London’s position as a leading global centre for life sciences and health technology. We collaborated with partners across London, including with London’s Health Innovation Networks, NHS England London Region, MedCity, the Greater London Authority and others, to build momentum around the city’s health innovation offer. Meanwhile, we have continued to support the Health Innovation Network as having a nationally critical role in delivery of the NHS 10-year plan and UK Life Science Sector plans.

From our home in the heart of the Hale House health tech ecosystem, we have connected clinicians, innovators, scientists, academics, policymakers and healthcare leaders. Through events and collaborations with partners, including UCL, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, we have opened up conversations on technology, ethics, robotics and AI. Our IGNITE Health Innovation Summit and AI workforce roundtable, for instance, helped shape practical thinking on how emerging technologies can be adopted in ways that are safe, trusted and focused on real patient benefit.

In February we were delighted to be joined by Dorothy Chou, our new Chair. Dorothy brings deep experience across technology, public policy and public trust, and her leadership will be invaluable as we help the health system navigate a period of rapid innovation and change.

In this report, we detail the progress we have made together with our partners over the past year. As ever, I’d like to recognise and thank all those that have worked with us over the past 12 months. Our impact is only possible because of the people and organisations across our ecosystem who are committed to improving health through innovation.

Kind regards,

Dr Chris Laing, CEO

My first few months as Chair have only reinforced why I decided to step into this role.

What UCLPartners can achieve — as an organisation that sits between health innovation and the clinicians and patients who need it — is unusual, and it matters. When I look across health innovation in the UK, I keep coming back to the same problem: we are full of brilliant ideas that rarely reach the people they were meant to help. Too much of that promise ends up leaving the country for markets that are easier to grow in, but don’t share our belief in health as a public good. This is rarely about the quality of the science, and much more about the structural and cultural gap between invention and widespread benefit.

That gap is where UCLPartners works. Few organisations have the mandate to bring the NHS, universities, innovators, industry, investors, and communities into the same room and keep them pointed in the same direction. The NHS isn’t a single system you can steer from the top. Getting an innovation adopted means winning over one organisation at a time, convincing each that it’s better and safer for their patients. That work is slow and unglamorous, and it is exactly the work this year’s impact report is full of.

This is about more than speed of adoption. It’s about building shared, open resources the whole system can draw on, rather than a hundred disconnected pilots. It’s about innovation that narrows inequalities instead of widening them. And it’s about listening to the people closest to care — the clinicians, nurses and patients who can see exactly what’s broken — because some of the best ideas start with them.

Helping those ideas through is one of the most valuable things we do.

I’m excited about the year ahead: strengthening London’s health innovation ecosystem, supporting collaboration across the Health Innovation Networks nationally, backing the people with the ideas, and creating the conditions for innovation that’s worth the public’s trust.

Kind regards,

Dorothy Chou, Chair

Our impact

£ 0 m+

investment raised

into the local health tech ecosystem
0

companies supported

including support to generate £9.2m in sales and investment
0 m+

patients reached

through the NHS Innovation Accelerator
0 k

patients screened

through our AI for urgent and emergency care programme, so patients at risk of unplanned admissions can be offered preventative coaching
0

patients onboarded

into a long term condition virtual care platform we helped design at the Royal Free with North Central London ICB and Doccla
£ 0 m

funding secured

from Macmillan to provide the personalised holistic support cancer patients need to continue their treatment
0 +

people given support

after being identified as at risk of heart attack or stroke via our CVD programme with Barts Health NHS trust
0

patients, carers and community representatives

worked with us to ensure new solutions reflected the needs of people they're intended to support
0

jobs created or safeguarded

at companies we supported
0

evaluations completed or ongoing

to help NHS teams and innovators understand what works and why, including on mental health models for young people, AI‑enabled diagnostics and VR‑supported stroke rehabilitation
0

NHS staff engaged

to develop 53 behaviour change interventions that will help NHS teams make sustainable change happen faster
£ 0

projected saving

for every £1 spent on the Digital Health Passport over the next three years
0

tests to be delivered

through a pilot with Cyted to identify people at risk of oesophageal cancer
0 +

parents and carers

helped develop an AI-powered chatbot to support children waiting for an autism or ADHD assessment
0 +

Digital health innovators

helped us reveal the hidden barriers to innovation, and how we overcome them