By Iram Nazir, Healthcare Client Director, SCC

When we brought NHS colleagues together with Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM) earlier this year to talk about AI, cyber security and sustainability, I went into the event expecting much of the conversation to be about technology.

What stayed with me afterwards was something different.

There was certainly excitement about AI and what it could mean for healthcare. But there was also something I think we need to talk about more openly: overwhelm.

For organisations already balancing operational pressures, workforce challenges, financial constraints, cyber threats and an increasingly complex technology estate, the question isn’t necessarily whether AI can help. It’s often much more fundamental.

Where do we start?

Which use cases should we prioritise? How do we build a credible business case? How do we demonstrate value rather than simply run another pilot? How do we understand the cyber and information-governance implications? And, ultimately, how do we move from an interesting piece of technology to something that genuinely improves the experience of patients and the people delivering their care?

Those conversations have stayed with me because I suspect they aren’t unique to the people who were in the room that day.

We don’t need to start with AI

This might sound counterintuitive coming from someone who spends much of his time talking to healthcare organisations about technology.

But I don’t think the starting question should be: “Where can we deploy AI?”

It should be: “What problem are we trying to solve?”

That subtle difference matters. Start with the technology and we risk finding problems for AI to solve. Start with the problem and we can ask whether AI – or something else entirely – is the right answer.

And we’re beginning to see some powerful examples of what happens when that approach works.

AVT gives the Midlands an interesting case study

Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) is becoming one of the clearest examples.

AVT can securely capture the conversation between clinician and patient and use AI to produce structured clinical documentation, which remains subject to clinician review and approval.

The important thing isn’t the technology itself. It’s the problem it is trying to solve: giving clinicians more time to be clinicians.

And the Midlands is now leading nationally.

In July 2026, NHS England announced that the Midlands had become the first region to procure AVT at scale, creating a route to the technology for all 1,239 GP practices and more than 70,000 clinicians across 15 acute and community trusts.

Early regional examples have shown the potential for AVT to reduce documentation time and address administrative backlogs. More importantly, the regional approach demonstrates how some of the difficult work around evidence, governance, compliance and procurement can be tackled collectively rather than requiring every organisation to begin from a blank sheet of paper.

Perhaps scaling innovation isn’t simply about finding more good technology. Perhaps it’s about making it easier for organisations to adopt what has already been shown to work.

But value has to be visible

This takes us back to one of the strongest conversations from our HIWM event: how do you build the business case?

Healthcare technology has traditionally been relatively comfortable talking about cost. AI requires us to become much better at talking about value.

If AVT gives a clinician time back, what happens to that time? Does it create additional clinical capacity? Reduce administrative backlog? Improve staff wellbeing? Improve the patient’s experience because their clinician is looking at them rather than a screen? Reduce waiting? Or perhaps several of those things simultaneously?

Those outcomes aren’t always easily represented in a traditional technology ROI calculation. Yet if we cannot articulate them, it becomes extremely difficult to prioritise investment.

That’s why I think value realisation needs to be designed into an AI programme from the beginning, rather than measured at the end.

And then there is cyber

Another message from our event was impossible to miss: cyber security is a major concern.

Understandably so. The more connected healthcare becomes, the greater the potential attack surface.

AI introduces additional questions around information governance, patient data, identity, third-party suppliers, model behaviour and where information is processed and stored.

AVT demonstrates this tension particularly well because the technology potentially sits inside one of healthcare’s most sensitive interactions: the conversation between a patient and clinician.

That doesn’t mean we should retreat from innovation. It means security has to be part of innovation rather than a gate we encounter at the end.

This is something I want to explore much more deeply in a future blog, because I increasingly believe that in healthcare, cyber resilience and patient safety are becoming inseparable conversations.

Sustainability surprised me too

Perhaps one of the most interesting discussions at our event concerned something that initially appeared unrelated to AI: the device estate.

Global supply-chain disruption over recent years has changed the economics and availability of technology. Yet there was genuine interest in the room when we discussed the possibility that devices approaching the end of their first useful life don’t necessarily have to become waste.

They can potentially be securely recovered, refurbished, redeployed, remarketed or donated.

That changes the conversation from “When do we replace our devices?” to “How do we extract maximum value from the technology we already own?”

That can have financial, environmental and social-value benefits.

It’s an area particularly close to us at SCC. Through SCC Recyclea, we’re working to extend technology lifecycles through refurbishment, remarketing and recycling, while helping organisations think differently about the residual value and second life of their technology estates.

That second life can create value beyond the organisation itself. Across the West Midlands, SCC has supported initiatives that use refurbished technology to help tackle digital exclusion, alongside the wider community work supported through the Sir Peter Rigby Charitable Trust.

For me, that demonstrates something important.

Sustainability shouldn’t just be about disposing of technology more responsibly. Done properly, circular technology can turn an organisation’s end-of-life assets into the beginning of somebody else’s digital opportunity.

Perhaps these aren’t three separate conversations after all

That is probably my biggest reflection from our HIWM event.

We started with three themes: AI. Cyber. Sustainability.

But increasingly, I don’t see them as three separate technology strategies. They’re connected.

If we want AI at scale, we need secure digital foundations. If we’re introducing more technology, we need to think about its whole-life environmental and financial impact. If we’re trying to demonstrate value, we need to look beyond purchase price towards productivity, workforce experience, patient outcomes, resilience, sustainability and social value.

And if all of that feels overwhelming, perhaps the answer isn’t to try to solve everything at once.

Start with the problem. Understand the outcome you’re trying to change. Establish how you’ll measure value. Bring cyber, clinical safety, information governance and sustainability into the conversation early. Then ask what technology can help you get there.

One question to leave with the region

The Midlands AVT programme shows what can happen when organisations collaborate rather than everyone starting independently.

I’d like to see us build on that philosophy.

Across the West Midlands we have NHS organisations, universities, innovators, industry partners and organisations such as Health Innovation West Midlands all tackling different parts of the same challenge.

So perhaps the question isn’t: “What AI should my organisation buy?”

Maybe it’s: “What problem are we collectively trying to solve – and what can we learn from one another about solving it?”

Because if we can make that shift, I think the West Midlands has an opportunity not simply to adopt healthcare innovation, but to demonstrate how it can be adopted responsibly, securely, sustainably and at scale.

Interested in joining us at a future event?

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