Funded by NHS England and delivered by UCLPartners in partnership with the Health Innovation Network, the NIA has helped scale over 140 evidence-based innovations across England since its founding in 2015, enhancing patient outcomes and service delivery.

The NIA identifies innovations already working in clinical care, workforce practice and system delivery, and helps them reach the organisations, commissioners and patients that need them most across health and social care.

Porter, told us: ‘Our goal is to find solutions that are already working somewhere in the NHS and then help them really go on that scaling journey.

‘There's no central lever that our team can pull that says we're just going to roll this out nationally now.

‘That planet doesn't exist and it doesn't exist within our team. But what we do a really good job at is, every year we will go out to the NHS and also internationally with a set of themes.'

Porter said there were ‘two elements' to the support the NIA offers innovators.

‘On one side is education, so it's teaching them everything they need to know about working with the NHS and making them the best suppliers they can be,' he commented.

‘We'd like them to do well but they have to be solving problems for us as a system so we train them up to make sure they're the best suppliers they can be.

‘We'll take them through everything they need to know around evidence generation, health economics, how to actually work with the NHS, contracting and all those different things.

‘Secondly, we have the delivery section, which is where we have a ton of information on things that are working in one part of the NHS.

‘Now it's our job to make sure they're connected to the rest of the system at a national level in terms of are they on the right pathways? Are the national clinical teams, for example, aware of what they're doing? Is this stuff being highlighted to the right teams that are making decisions around the bigger programmes like the National Health Tech Access Programme or what used to be medtech mandate funding?'

The NIA also works at a local level to support Health Innovation Networks and ICBs.

‘We sit down with them and go through what problems they're trying to solve right now, what their major priorities are and then highlight things already working in another part of the system and really give them as much information from that independent, validated point of view,' Porter explained.

He said one of the biggest challenges in scaling innovation across the NHS was avoiding starting from scratch at almost every point.

‘We could start from scratch and try to create something ourselves or start from a pilot phase on a problem that may already been solved in a different part of the system,' Porter said.

‘It's just being aware of that and making sure we do the horizon scanning properly.

‘Lots of systems will think their population is different but I believe there's some common themes across all parts of the NHS and there are single solutions that can solve a lot of that.'

This is an extract from our forthcoming special report, AI and preventative healthcare, which we will be publishing in September.