Funding is always a challenge. It’s not that funding doesn’t exist – there are often pots of money that appear, acting as a kind of saving grace for many startups and helping them get in the door. However, a number of companies hit a wall when that funding runs out. There’s nowhere for them to go next.

Another major challenge for startups, especially those engaging with the NHS, is cultural. It can feel like two entirely different languages being spoken: a tech startup founder eager to solve a problem, and senior clinicians or nurses, who have been in post for 20 or 30 years, with deep knowledge of their system.

That’s one of the things the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) is trying to address – bridging the gap and translating between the two worlds.

What is the NHS Innovation Accelerator?

The NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) is a programme designed to support the uptake and spread of proven healthcare innovations. It was established to help address the longstanding difficulties that many health and care innovations face when trying to move beyond local pilots and achieve wider adoption.

“The NIA is a three-year support programme designed specifically for proven innovations,” said Jack Porter, Co-Director, NHS Innovation Accelerator. “That distinction is important, because unlike many other support schemes within the NHS, the NIA positions itself towards the later stages of the innovation journey.”

Each year, a cohort of carefully selected innovations and their creators – known as Fellows – join the programme. The programme focuses on technologies, services, and models of care that already have strong evidence behind them and are either in use within the NHS or, in some cases, implemented within an equivalent healthcare system.

What the NIA offers is tailored, structured support to help these innovations scale. This includes access to learning events, one-to-one delivery conversations, and crucially, connections into the health and care system. One of the persistent challenges across the NHS is a lack of visibility over what’s already working elsewhere in the system. Too often, individual trusts or regions attempt to reinvent solutions without first exploring whether another organisation has already made progress in tackling the same problem. The NIA addresses this by actively mapping what exists, what is delivering results, and providing that insight to decision-makers.

To be accepted onto the programme, organisations must go through a rigorous assessment and due diligence process that takes around six months to complete.

The three-year length of the programme recognises that meaningful adoption in healthcare rarely happens within a matter of months. It takes time to navigate complex procurement processes, build trust within organisations, and integrate new solutions into existing workflows.

The core pillars of success

The NIA is built around three core pillars: Access, Learn, and Connect. Each of these runs across the three-year duration of the programme, offering different forms of support to help innovations scale within the health and care system.

The Access pillar focuses on providing fellows with connections to key individuals and organisations across the NHS. The NIA works closely with the Health Innovation Networks – a group of 15 regional bodies that liaise with the 42 Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), local trusts, primary care providers, and local authorities. In addition, the NIA is overseen by a board chaired by Professor Sir Stephen Powis, National Medical Director for NHS England, and includes leadership from the NHS England innovation space at both national and regional levels. This structure gives the programme considerable reach across the system.

The Learning pillar centres around quarterly events designed to keep fellows informed of policy updates and operational changes affecting their businesses. There’s a tailored track specifically for first-year fellows, offering additional sessions to cover the fundamentals of navigating the NHS. While most fellows arrive with a decent working knowledge of the health system, these sessions are refined to cover current, practical issues. These quarterly events also act as strategic briefings. Senior leaders from the Department of Health, NHS England, and regional authorities are invited to share what’s happening in their areas over the coming months.

The Connect element of the NIA is a part of the programme that runs throughout the entire three-year period. This focuses on making direct, meaningful introductions between innovators and the NHS organisations looking for solutions. To support this, the NIA has a team of dedicated delivery managers who work closely with individual ICBs, trusts, Health Innovation Networks, and regional NHS teams. Their role is essentially to act as matchmakers: when a healthcare organisation is searching for a solution in a specific area, the delivery managers can step in and identify which innovations on the NIA programme are relevant. Alongside these connections, the programme also fosters valuable relationships between the innovators themselves. By becoming part of the NIA network, participants gain the opportunity to share insights, experiences, and lessons learned, building a community of peers who can offer support and collaboration both during and beyond the programme.

The end goal

“For us, the priority lies more in the actual scale and breadth of where an innovation is being used,” said Porter. The measure of success should be whether the innovation is solving problems at scale.

Some of the early success stories from the programme include familiar names like DrDoctor, which has now achieved both national and international reach. It has become something of a household name within digital health circles.

Another early innovator was Nervecentre. It has made serious inroads in the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) market, turning over around £250 million last year and securing more EPR contracts than any other supplier in the sector.

Among the newer cohort, companies like Thalamos are particularly exciting. Thalamos is digitising the entire Mental Health Act pathway. It recently completed a significant project with the NHS London regional team and is being rolled out across all ICPs in London.

Further support on the horizon

“Within the learning programme, we want to expand the amount of paid-for support we offer. One of the benefits of the programme is that we have budget allocated for one-to-one, bespoke support. For instance, if a fellow comes to us with a challenge around procurement, we have independent procurement advisors we can connect them with, and we cover the cost of that support,” notes Porter.

The biggest priority for Porter, though, is around digitising the programme itself. “I want to take inspiration from what some of our fellows are already doing in this area. At the moment, the Connect aspect of the programme is very dependent on individual conversations between someone within the system and a member of our team. To address that, we’re currently working on a complete refresh of our website.”

The first phase of that will go live in May 2025, which will make the site much easier to navigate and significantly improve access to resources. Then, in August, they will launch the second phase – a comprehensive resource library. Anyone with an NHS email address will be able to log in and smartly search for information. For example, if someone is leading a transformation project, they’ll be able to see what’s already happening across the country, what solutions they currently have on the programme, and what’s working elsewhere.

“It will display a live, updated heat map of where these solutions have been deployed, include contact details for people already using them, and provide business cases, information governance documentation, and case studies. Essentially, it will bring together everything people need to know, all in one place,” said Porter.

The NIA is now firmly positioned as the NHS’s leading accelerator, having been recognised as a leading startup hub in Europe by the Financial Times.

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe