75: HealthTech Hour with Steve Roest - Episode 7575: HealthTech Hour with Steve Roest - Episode 75
UK Health Radio Podcast
Recorded live at the Rewired conference, this HealthTech Hour focuses on how electronic patient records, regulation, procurement and nursing-led innovation are shaping digital health in the NHS. Guests share research findings, frontline experience and candid views on what really needs to change for technology to help staff and patients more effectively.
56:07•7 Apr 2026
HealthTech Hour at Rewired: EPR Reality Checks, People Power and Nursing on the Front Line
Episode Overview
- Electronic patient records are now nearly universal in the NHS, but meaningful productivity gains and better care still depend on investment in training, hardware and smarter use of data.
- NHS staff report using multiple fragmented systems each day, with interoperability and data access emerging as major barriers to real benefits from digital tools.
- Procurement for digital and service-based solutions lags behind traditional purchasing of physical items, and the system risks losing the experienced people needed to manage long-term transformation.
- Comparisons with the US FDA highlight how clear, time-bound regulatory pathways and targeted acceleration can strongly influence where digital health companies choose to grow.
- Nursing voices show that digitisation must reduce documentation burden and support safer workflows, as seen in closed-loop medicines administration projects that can save time, cut waste and improve safety when properly evaluated.
“You can give me money. You can't give me time. You can't give me experience.”
Ever wondered what it takes to turn clunky health IT into tools staff actually like using? This live-on-the-floor edition of HealthTech Hour, recorded at the Rewired conference in Birmingham, gives you a fast-paced tour of that question from three very different perspectives. Host Steve Roest chats first with Alexandra Lawrence from The Health Foundation about fresh research on electronic patient records (EPRs) across the NHS.
She explains that while EPR coverage is almost universal, genuine productivity gains are still rare, and that staff experience is a crucial reality check on whether systems actually help. Fragmented systems, poor training and tricky data access show that hitting “100% implementation” was only the starting line, not the finish. As Alexandra puts it, the scale of investment needed to make EPRs truly useful was “100%” underestimated.
Policy and strategy come into focus with Hassan, who talks about procurement headaches, the danger of losing organisational memory, and why technology alone never changes anything. His line, “You can give me money. You can't give me time. You can't give me experience,” neatly captures the risk of cutting the very people who know how to make change stick.
He and Steve swap candid views on the differences between UK, EU and US regulation, and why the FDA’s clearer, faster pathways are tempting digital health companies away from Europe. Finally, nurse leader and Chief Nursing Information Officer Hayley brings it right to the bedside. She describes nurses as the largest, most constant workforce in the NHS, yet often the last to be asked what actually works.
From documentation that swallows a quarter of a nurse’s day to robot-driven “closed loop” medicines administration that can save time and improve safety, she shows how tech can genuinely help if it’s co-designed, carefully rolled out and properly evaluated. If you care about how digital health can support real people doing real work, this conversation might get you asking: are your systems helping staff, or just keeping score?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.
Related Episodes
Similar episodes from other shows in the catalogue.