NIHR’s Invention for Innovation Funding At the Speed of Translation (FAST) programme is offering funding between £50,000 and £100,000 over a period of six-to-twelve months for preventative technologies in the community care space.
The programme is designed to support the real-world integration of tech aligned with the prevention agenda into community care settings such as neighbourhood health hubs, community diagnostic centres, and community pharmacies.
Advice for applicants includes the need to consider whether innovations are optimised for volume, and encouragement to engage with intended settings prior to submission, with evidence of this engagement reportedly significantly strengthening applications. “We particularly encourage applications that leverage “settings where people are” to address health inequalities and engage underserved populations,” NIHR adds.
Prevention may include primary interventions based on environment, behaviour or lifestyle; or secondary pathways such as risk stratification and escalation pathways. Secondary prevention also includes interventions treating “high-risk” conditions such as hypertension, pre-diabetes, or early stage liver disease, in order to prevent heart attacks, stroke, or cirrhosis.
Requirements are that applications should meet a minimum of technology readiness level, with evidence of implementation via pilot data or prior feasibility in community or primary care. The main aim of the application must also be integration within the community care pathway, or a three-way link between innovation, end-user, and the health record or care pathway.
Technologies that focus on existing conditions without a preventative function, those for exclusive use in an acute hospital setting, and those already fully established in the market but seeking simple adoption funding, are amongst those that are deemed “out of scope” for funding.
The closing date for applications is 29 April 2026, with funding decisions expected to be made around June. To learn more about the opportunity, please click here.
Wider trend: The shift to prevention and proactive care
The Department of Health and Social Care has published an impact statement noting the rationale behind many of the key measures introduced in the 10-Year Plan, covering potential impact, costs, benefits, and risks. Focusing in on the three shifts from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and reactive to proactive care, it tackles each element of proposed reform separately in a detailed 81-page document. The DHSC outlines a “strong economic case” for moving to a more preventative model, citing evidence that applying evidence-based preventative interventions earlier and on a wider scale could offer a 33 percent reduction in ill health and unlock around a £320 billion rise in GDP over 20 years.
Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland ICB and Northamptonshire ICB’s latest five-year strategic commissioning plan to 2031 highlights the move from short-term recovery to longer-term transformation, outlining the role of digital and data in areas such as population health, neighbourhood health, and prevention. Core commissioning ambitions include improving access and flow for elective care, urgent and emergency care, and neighbourhoods, the ICBs state, modernising pathways, reducing variation, and relying on digital connectivity and shared care records to help deliver care closer to home. Digital and data literacy will be enhanced across the workforce to support a “digital by default” approach to commissioning, and digital tools and real-time data will help promote proactive care.
Kent and Medway ICB’s Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) strategy for 2025 – 2029 has been published, sharing intentions to personalise services, focus on prevention, promote interoperable systems, and use data-enabled strategic commissioning to target needs and allocate system resources. Five priority areas are outlined, including equality and digital inclusion, where the board shares plans to use population health analytics and risk stratification to identify need and target resources, to scale remote monitoring and virtual wards, and to build digital skills with targeted learning. Infrastructure needs to be secure, scalable, and interoperable, with commitments highlighted to adopting cloud-first and API-first architecture, implementing FHIR-based interoperability, consolidating legacy systems, and standardising data models.
