Like many of us working in the NHS, I have an instinctive suspicion of the healthcare system in the US. Our universal model, free at the point of delivery based on clinical need, is so fundamental to what we do every day for our patients that the expensive, privatised and insurance-based US system feels quite alien. 

However, after witnessing some of this first hand recently, I have to admit to a slight change of heart. Not about the funding mechanism, but on learning from healthcare professionals who share our goals of improving patient outcomes and improving population health. 

I was privileged to spend a week visiting some amazing hospital systems, universities, and insurers in Tennessee as part of a trade mission by the Association of British HealthTech Industries (ABHI). I accompanied a fantastic group of UK health tech innovators who are at the cutting edge of improving patient outcomes and efficiency, enriching my experience further.

Nashville is known globally for its Country and Western music scene, but its $15bn music industry is dwarfed by a $72bn healthcare economy. The state capital is home to some of the biggest providers on the continent, including HCA, which operates about 190 hospitals in the US alone. However, healthcare spend in the US accounts for nearly a fifth of GDP, almost double the UK's figure.

At Barts Health we are among the biggest NHS trusts in Britain but lack a comparable country-wide reach. It became a running joke at our meetings that if we couldn't match the US health systems on scale at least we could surpass them at history – and I couldn't resist mentioning how the monk Rahere founded our first hospital, St Bartholomew's, to care for ‘the sick and the poor of East London' back in 1123.  

Despite our different funding systems, I found my US counterparts shared many of the same values. They put patients first, especially in terms of experience and outcomes. They are interested in continuous improvement and innovation. And in most cases, any ‘profits' they make subsidise the public system they operate through Medicare and Medicaid and the ‘Obama-care' act of 2010. Moreover, they collaborate with each other for mutual benefit, even as competitors.

Leaving profit aside (and to be fair some systems were not for profit alongside for profit systems), what I found most fascinating was how we all face the same challenges – rising demand, increasing costs and the need to enhance productivity. While the US may use different terminology like ‘boarding' patients in their ED instead of what we would term ‘unplaced' patients the issues was the same – how can we improve patient flow, outcomes and experience. 

Innovation is key to healthcare in the US. Put simply, they take more risks in pursuit of a better experience for their customers (patients). They create vehicles that get the novel clinical ideas in, back their development with investment, test them in a real-life clinical environment and sponsor spin-off companies whose revenue goes back into the healthcare system. AI was a huge part of this in both clinical and business settings. 

I saw an interesting example of business innovation in action at a specialist orthopaedic provider in Memphis. They developed an impressive AI programme to interrogate all of their patient and company data to better inform operational and clinical decisions. For example, a surgeon had asked whether there was a viable clinical business case to open a new clinic in a particular geographical location and was convinced this was true: in this case the analysis, that would normally take significant human time to evaluate came back in seconds with the answer – ‘no', with all the rationale behind this, based on their own data. 

Clearly the US healthcare system is ahead of us in the speed of digital adoption and use of data. But the NHS, and London in particular, is catching up fast – especially with the single data environment. One health insurer told us how they were able to use data forensically for patients by ‘tiering' their clinicians by ranking their cost per procedure against the quality of treatment and patient satisfaction. Patients can use the list to choose which specific doctor they want, thus providing an in-built incentive for continuous clinical improvement as well as a better deal for patients.

The entrepreneurs in our UK delegation remarked that they often found it easier to achieve adoption at scale in the US because it is a more agile market. The NHS, while a smaller target, can at times feel to be more bureaucratic and harder to penetrate. We put potential collaborators through a lot of hoops. And by the time the next AI innovation comes along we are still ruminating on how to adopt the last one.

So, can we remove these obstacles? As it happens, this is precisely what some of us are trying to do. For example, through UCLPartners we are seeking to develop an innovation passport for London which would allow members to adopt innovations and techniques already developed within the NHS much more quickly, so no-one has to start from scratch.

And here in Whitechapel, our own Barts Life Sciences Cluster is a pioneering £800m partnership with life science estate developers to produce a huge footprint of investment and regeneration, enabling entrepreneurs and investors direct access to our clinical innovators in the adjacent Royal London hospital and Barts Health more broadly.

We have one of the most diverse and fastest-growing urban populations in the country, with residents speaking dozens of different languages and representing ethnic groups across the world. Allied to the live clinical environment of a major teaching hospital, this ecosystem offers an unrivalled testbed for innovations that could transform healthcare. Now I'm back, I'm arranging a number of follow-up meetings, and there is a sense of real excitement about the once in a generation investment going into the Whitechapel campus, and its benefits to our wider population.

We've got lots of talented people in the NHS and they have loads of good ideas. What we can learn from our counterparts in the US is how to be more agile in the faster scaling and adoption of innovation. The US approach to patient experience was also something we can learn from. On the flip side my sense was the US can also learn from the UK approach in that universal access tends to improve outcomes and equity (at a lower cost than the US) with the added benefit of a system built around general practice, with its benefits to chronic disease co-ordination and management.