The HealthTech industry has spent years bringing new digital tools into healthcare. Now, the focus is turning to something less glamorous but far more important: reliability.
Healthcare organisations are under a lot more pressure to keep systems running safely and securely. New data from SonicWall shows cyber criminals are targeting the sector, which is making reliable technology a priority for hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers.
According to SonicWall, the UK healthcare sector recorded 264,000 intrusion prevention system events between January and May 2026. That came after a full year total of 27,000 events in 2025. The company said healthcare recorded the highest per device attack intensity of any sector in the UK.
What Is Making Reliable Healthtech More Important?
Healthcare organisations are dealing with old systems and new digital platforms at the same time – a combination that can create weaknesses that attackers look for.
SonicWall reported that 41% of recorded attacks targeted the long running Log4j software flaw. The company also found that 33% of monitored sensors experienced attacks aimed at F5 BIG IP load balancers. New patient portals built on modern web frameworks also attracted interest from attackers.
Spencer Starkey, executive vice president for EMEA at SonicWall, said, “Our data indicated ransomware volumes dropped a sharp 87% in 2025 across UK businesses as “Big Game Hunters” traded volume for precision, going after fewer targets with bigger payloads. Healthcare didn’t get that memo. Attackers are targeting our hospitals, and stress-testing them to breaking points.”
He added, “This is a double-edged crisis. Zombie Tech, ancient unpatched systems and legacy Java keeps haunting the NHS because administrators can’t just take a critical care system offline to patch it. Meanwhile, the rush to digitise has opened the door to brand-new web vulnerabilities in patient portals. Threat actors have clocked the gap between old and new, and they’re scanning for it relentlessly.”
What Does Reliable HealthTech Look Like?
Dr. Dorothy Ogwuru, founder of PharmaLink Academy and a UK pharmaceutical professional, believes the sector is becoming more evidence led.
“UK healthtech is evolving from an innovation-first to an evidence-first approach. Companies that are truly leading the charge are not only creating more rapid digital solutions, but are designing systems and tools to address and work with patient safety, validation, and clinical usability as well as continuous monitoring after the product is in the market.”
She said reliability comes down to consistent performance and accountability.
Her words were, “When a product is reliable, it means that the product performs consistently in the real world. Furthermore, there is a clear explanation when something goes wrong. In order to achieve this, there must be a seamless collaboration between developers, clinicians, regulators, and safety experts.”
Dr. Ogwuru also said people are as important as technology. “The other major challenge that we must now tackle is workforce readiness. Healthtech can only be dependable when the stakeholders have credibility to assess the validity of the tools. An improvement in technology will not guarantee healthtech if the health professionals do not have confidence to utilise the technology, nor the necessary regulatory knowledge.”
Hospitals want tech that works every day, protects patient data and works well within clinical settings and reliability is becoming one of the most valuable qualities in healthtech today.
What Do Experts Think?
Experts have answered the question: how is HealtTech in the UK pushing for better and more reliable healthcare solutions?
Our Experts:
- Nick Lansman, CEO and Founder, Health Tech Alliance
- Dr Kenny Livingstone, Founder & CEO, ZoomDoc
- Simon Hayward, VP of Sales, Freshworks
- Neil Daly, Founder, Skin Analytics
- Emma Pepperell, CEO, bit.bio
- Professor Tara Rampal, Founder, QuestPrehab
- Stuart Harvey, CEO, Datactics
- Dr Helen O’Neill, CEO, Hertility
- Anastasia Shubareva-Epshtein, Founder, Carea
- Olivia Brooks, Head Of Investments, Founders Factory
Nick Lansman, CEO and Founder, Health Tech Alliance
“The issue of health tech reliability is more than just having a product that works, it is about its usability, long term value and whether it positively impacts patient outcomes and the health system.
“With market access regulations evolving regularly, our Health Tech Alliance members are investing heavily in the evidence base behind their technologies, building the kind of clinical data that demonstrates improved diagnostic accuracy, reduced need for repeat testing, faster time to diagnosis, and better patient or better patient or clinical adherence, aligning with NICE guidance and the wider ambitions of the NHS 10 Year Plan.
“Following the publication of the Department of Health and Social Care’s Value based procurement national standard guidance for medical technology, published earlier this month, health tech suppliers are focusing evidence on demonstrating broader social value including improved outcomes and reduced costs of the patient pathway and providing long-term benefits to all partners in the health system.
“What ‘reliable’ looks like depends on the technology. For example, for wearables and remote monitoring tools, it means capturing continuous, accurate data that clinicians can act on without adding to their workload, and that patients can use with minimal disruption to daily life.
“For surgical and implantable devices, reliability means rigorous production of long-term outcome data, a device that is as minimally invasive as possible, and genuine evidence that it addresses an unmet clinical need rather than simply offering an incremental alternative to existing care. Implantable technologies often serve patients who have exhausted other options, so the bar for demonstrating real-world benefit, not just clinical plausibility, has to be higher.
“The Health Tech Alliance represents companies right across this spectrum, from diagnostics and digital health through to implantable and surgical technologies, and what unites our members is a drive towards demonstrating long-term benefit, to patients and to the system as a whole.”
Dr Kenny Livingstone, Founder & CEO, ZoomDoc
“The next phase of UK healthtech innovation isn’t about replacing clinicians – it’s about removing unnecessary friction from healthcare. Some of the biggest gains come from automating administrative processes that consume valuable clinical time while maintaining high standards of governance and patient safety.
“At ZoomDoc, we’ve seen how digital medical certification can transform what has traditionally been a slow, manual process. Working with leading pharmacies, virtual GP providers and the travel industry, including major airlines, we’ve developed technology that enables medical certificates and letters to be generated securely and efficiently, with appropriate clinical oversight.
“We’re now extending this through ZoomDocPro, working alongside NHS GP practices to help clinicians provide non-NHS medical letters more efficiently. By combining AI-assisted document generation with integrated payment systems and existing clinical workflows, GPs can produce high-quality documentation in seconds rather than spending valuable consultation time on administrative tasks or requiring unnecessary face-to-face appointments.
“The future of reliable healthtech isn’t simply about AI – it’s about creating trusted, interoperable systems that fit naturally into clinical practice, reduce administrative burden and improve access for patients without compromising quality or governance. If we can give clinicians more time to focus on patient care while making essential services faster and more accessible, that’s where technology delivers its greatest value.”
Simon Hayward, VP of Sales, Freshworks
“I think people forget about the basics when health and tech cross over. If you take NHS Christie for example, they had to employ two full-time employees who spent their days just triaging an email inbox full of IT issues. Busy clinicians and staff submitted IT requests with minimal detail (as minimalist, even, as “my printer’s broken”) and someone on the other end had to chase down the rest of the information before a ticket could be logged. At Europe’s largest single-site cancer hospital serving 60,000 patients a year, every hand helps which means two people absorbed by administrative friction aren’t being used to support vital clinical operations.
“Digital operations lead Dan Hollands replaced a broken legacy system with Freshservice specifically because the internal team could own it. Half of Christie’s roughly 6,000 monthly tickets now arrive through the self-service portal. The two-triage staff have been redeployed.
“Freddy AI Copilot summarises incoming tickets and drafts responses, cutting through the vague descriptions that once created delays. Technology in the health sector means lots of things to different people and gets a lot of varied headlines. Sometimes the simple things, even just printing patient information, can delay skilled clinicians and support staff from doing do the work that matters.”
Neil Daly, Founder, Skin Analytics
“‘Reliability’ gets thrown around a lot in healthtech, but it isn’t a marketing claim. It’s a regulatory one. The strictest tier of UK and EU medical device approval, Class III, requires years of clinical evidence and real-world deployment data before a product can be trusted to support diagnosis, not internal testing dressed up as proof.
“That’s the real divide in this sector right now. It isn’t AI versus no AI, it’s tools that have been through that level of scrutiny and those that haven’t. At Skin Analytics, we’ve spent six years building that evidence base inside the NHS, and it’s that grounding, not the technology alone, that earned us Class III status. The industry won’t be taken seriously on reliability through louder claims. It’ll get there through tools that have earned the highest regulatory bar, not bypassed it.”
Emma Pepperell, CEO, bit.bio
“One of the greatest opportunities in UK healthcare is improving the quality and reproducibility of the biological models that underpin research and drug discovery. More reliable healthcare solutions begin with more reliable science.
“We believe precision and consistency are essential to accelerating innovation. By programming human cells with high consistency and manufacturing them at scale, we aim to provide researchers with human-relevant models that can reduce experimental variability and generate more dependable data. Better biological models give scientists greater confidence in the insights they generate, helping to support more informed decisions throughout the drug research and development process.
“The UK has an exceptional combination of scientific talent, academic excellence and an increasingly collaborative life sciences ecosystem. Continued investment in enabling technologies that improve reproducibility, scalability and access to high-quality research tools will be key to maintaining that leadership.
“Ultimately, building more reliable healthcare solutions is a collective effort. It depends on bringing together advances in synthetic biology, engineering, data science and manufacturing to create technologies that empower researchers and help accelerate the development of the next generation of medicines.”
Professor Tara Rampal, Founder, QuestPrehab
“UK healthtech is finally getting serious: fewer pilots, more real-world proven tools that actually work in the NHS. We’re stress‑testing products in real workflows, not cosy sandboxes – reliability is now a non‑negotiable clinical safety issue.
“The companies that will win are the ones treating trust as a foundational KPI , not a tagline, and proving impact in patient outcomes.”
Stuart Harvey, CEO, Datactics
“AI is revolutionising the healthcare industry, supporting faster diagnostics and clinical support by analysing images to detect diseases earlier, but it also introduces its own set of challenges because it relies on highly sensitive and regulated patient data and identity information. AI solutions depend on integrating data across a complex ecosystem involving the NHS, local authorities and technology vendors, which requires platforms to work successfully and cohesively.”
“Alongside privacy, data quality is a critical safety issue. If you are unable to rely on the quality of a dataset to distinguish between, for example, grams and milligrams, the consequences could be potentially fatal. AI is only as reliable as the information it is trained and deployed on. Data must be of good quality in any industry to have successful AI, but especially in healthcare, there is no room for error.”
Dr Helen O’Neill, CEO, Hertility
“Too many platforms stop at providing information, when what people really need are clear answers and a path to care that is personalised to them.
“Innovation should not come at the expense of patient safety. At Hertility, we know trust is vital, so we combine accurate diagnostics and expert clinicians to deliver personalised end-to-end care, from symptom to solution. Every woman who comes through our platform helps strengthen our understanding of women’s health, making our technology more accurate over time, while every result remains grounded in rigorous clinical validation, CQC-accredited regulatory standards and expert oversight.
“Reliable healthcare is about using high-quality evidence to help people receive faster diagnoses, access treatment sooner and make informed decisions about their health. That’s how healthtech moves beyond passive insights and starts delivering meaningful improvements in patient care.”
Anastasia Shubareva-Epshtein, Founder, Carea
“Reliability in healthtech cannot just be about innovation, it has to be about accountability. The leaders doing this well are the ones building clinical oversight, consumer insights and research findings into their products from day one – rather than treating outside input as an afterthought once the technology already exists.
“The other shift I am seeing is in much-needed honesty about the limits of AI in healthcare. The best use of AI right now is not replacing clinical judgement but enabling it, personalising the experience and flagging when a person may need support, while keeping the actual care firmly in human hands. The companies getting this right are clear about that boundary rather than blurring it for the sake of a flashier pitch.
“Data protection is the other non-negotiable. Health data is some of the most sensitive information a person can share, and trust has to be earned through rigorous, certified compliance, not simply claimed in a privacy policy. Reliable healthtech means designing for the person at the centre of the data, not just the data itself. That is the standard the whole industry should be held to.”
Olivia Brooks, Head Of Investments, Founders Factory
“Healthcare is undergoing a once-in-a-generation evolution, spurred on by tech advances.
“AI is transforming healthcare at every stage of the patient journey, from diagnosis and treatment to recovery. Just as importantly, it helps health workers operate more efficiently by enabling faster, smarter decision-making.
“UK healthtech is the driving force in this shift. From breakout stars like Scan.com who streamlines how patients and doctors book MRI, CAT scan, and X-ray appointments to the next generation of healthtech ventures like Genie Fertility whose founders have developed an AI discovery platform unlocks new molecular biomarkers to better understand reproductive health.”
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