Applications have opened for the Grow Digital Health Midlands Enabling Fund, delivered by Health Innovation East Midlands and Health Innovation West Midlands, offering awards of up to £20,000 for digital health solutions.
In a LinkedIn post, Ralph Evans, NHSE triage lead (innovation, research, life sciences and strategy), shared that solutions sought include those capable of increasing productivity through Did Not Attend identification, demand and capacity planning, intelligent rostering and demand prediction; and those enabling patient self-management or building neighbourhood health capacity.
Expressions of interest are to be submitted by 27 September, 2026, with successful applicants to be notified by 9 October. Those who are successful will then move on to complete a second stage, or a full application.
Applications will need to demonstrate alignment with local need and national policy direction, according to Health Innovation East Midlands, as well as how they improve health outcomes and encompass value for money. “Innovators are expected to make some sort of ‘in kind’ contribution to the proposed project e.g. offering discounted / cost prices or providing training and onboarding free of charge,” it continues.
Applications must further include executive sponsorship from an adopting NHS or public sector organisation applying to the fund, and will need to explain their approach to procuring and sustaining the innovation after the project conclusion.
Wider trend: Health innovation
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust has outlined its intention to prioritise five initial ideas to pilot under its Transform, Improve, Maximise, and Enable (TIME) digital innovation programme. The three-year programme has an aim to save colleagues time and release more time for patient care by making use of digital technologies including AI and automation, according to the trust. As part of this, colleagues across the trust are also being trained in the use of Copilot. The first phase of the programme is to focus on generating ideas from colleagues, developing governance and policies, and creating guidance and education for staff on the use of new technologies.
The National Commission into the Regulation of AI has put forward a series of recommendations for a future regulatory framework, finding strong support for the use of AI in healthcare being “conditional, rather than automatic”. The central conclusion, the commission goes on, is that future regulation needs to be more proportionate, lifecycle-based, and system-wide. “Current approaches were largely designed for products that are more static and easier to reliably assess at a single point in time,” it states. “AI-enabled products may iterate rapidly, perform differently in different settings and depend on the data, workflows, people and organisations around them.”
Following a judging process spanning two months, with the help from a superb group of NHS professionals, we are delighted to reveal the finalists in the Health Tech Awards 2026! We would like to say a huge well done to our finalists, and importantly we are proud to share insights into these projects with the health tech community. Through our awards microsite here, learn about each project in each category.
