Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust is partnering with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to launch a health innovation sandbox, to test promising innovations in real-world NHS settings.
Healthcare solutions to improve patient care and safety will be rapidly evaluated, the MHRA shares, with one of the first tools to test capable of identifying patients at high risk of complications from long-term conditions.
“New healthcare technologies often show potential in development, but proving they work in real healthcare settings is critical, so patients can benefit from them,” the Agency continues. “ The Manchester Sandbox has been created to address this challenge, bringing together healthcare providers, regulators and innovators earlier in the process.”
The MHRA also recognises the opportunities offered by the sandbox for testing regulatory approaches appropriate for the current and future needs of the healthcare system, and for the NHS in making informed decisions on which innovations best meet the needs of patients.
Expressions of interest from medical device developers interested in taking part in the next phase of the programme are to be sought, the Agency states, with a roundtable to be held later in 2026 to bring together healthcare providers, innovators, and public representatives to shape the next wave of projects.
Lawrence Tallon, MHRA chief executive, said: “AI and other emerging technologies have enormous potential to improve patient care. The challenge is understanding how they work in practice and where they can make the biggest difference. Manchester brings together the NHS, innovators, researchers and regulators to do exactly that. The learning from this programme could help shape how safe and effective technologies are introduced across the country, helping more patients benefit from innovation.”
MFT’s chief executive Mark Cubbon also pointed to the value in helping improve understandings of how new technologies perform in real-world settings. “By creating a clearer route from innovation to safe adoption, we can help people gain faster access to developments that have the potential to improve care, while maintaining the high standards of safety that patients rightly expect,” he added. “The learning we generate here at MFT could help shape how effective innovations are adopted across the wider NHS, and we are excited to share it more widely at the right time.”
The trust took to LinkedIn to share the news:
Wider trend: Health innovation in Greater Manchester
A total of £11.1 million in funding has been committed to the launch of a wearables and remote monitoring innovation cluster in Greater Manchester; a partnership between Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the NIHR Manchester Health Determinants Research Collaboration. The ambition is to help reduce barriers to innovation in wearable and remote health monitoring technologies by developing a simpler process to bring technologies to the market.
Greater Manchester ICB has launched its five-year strategic commissioning plan to 2031, with the three shifts to digital, community, and prevention embedded into a number of priority areas. A new digital strategy is to be published in January 2027 to build the digital capability to enable its objectives, it explains, going on to detail the role of digital and innovation in the delivery of future care in the region. Delivering the plan will require “transformational change at a significant pace and scale”, the ICB notes, including a step change in culture, leadership, and collaboration; in digital analytics, finance, and contracting; and in creating the conditions for change across the system.
The board of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) has updated on the expansion of its Hive EPR across local care organisations, the introduction of a digital and data academy, and the launch of a new secure data analytics platform. The EPR expansion represents a move toward a single, unified patient record for acute and community care, the trust explains, covering more than 150 services across Manchester and Trafford LCO community health services. It hopes to address challenges with the current fragmented digital landscape, delivering improved patient safety, and making better use of available community capacity.
