Part of £250 million in funding given by the UK Department for Health and Social Care to the UK’s digital health and social care transformation program to establish an AI Lab aimed at improving the health and lives of patients, a newly announced AI in Health and Care Award makes available £140 million to innovators in the UK during the next three years.

With a call for applications running twice a year, the award will initially focus on four areas: screening, diagnosis, clinical decision support and system efficiency.

According to health secretary Matt Hancock in a speech at last week’s Parliament & Healthtech conference in London, “Too many good ideas in the NHS never make it past the pilot stage. NHS Improvement estimate that it takes 17 years on average for a new product or device to go from successful clinical trial to mainstream adoption. Seventeen years. That is far too long. We need a culture that rewards and incentivizes adoption as well as invention.”

The award will be managed by the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) in partnership with NHSX and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). With the new award, innovators will be supported through the following phases: technical feasibility, development and evaluation, real world testing, initial health system adoption, and national scale-up.

In a statement, Guy Boersma, Network Digital & AI Executive Lead for the UK’s Academic Health Science Network, said:  “We welcome the launch of this new fund to fast track the implementation of the most promising AI innovation into frontline care. AI has the potential to address the many challenges impacting services today, such as those around workforce and the aging population. As part of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, the AHSN Network looks forward to supporting this program through the adoption and spread of AI across our strong research and innovation network.”

At the conference, in addition to announcing the award, health secretary Hancock took the time to address the concerns of UK stakeholders who are still skeptical of the government’s focus on technology.

“If you work in the NHS, in any part of the service, far too often old, out-of-date 20th century technology gets in the way of your ability to do your job. So I completely get why some people think now is not the time to be talking genomics, automation and AI,” Hancock said. “(But) I respectfully disagree. . . . The point is that sometimes the cutting edge can help us solve those bread-and-butter problems and move us to a new generation of solutions. Better technology is vital to have and embracing it is the only way to make the NHS sustainable over the long term.”