The Health Innovation Network brings together the 15 health innovation networks across England. 

Commissioned by NHS England and the Office for Life Sciences, we are the innovation adoption experts, helping health and care systems find, test, implement and scale innovations that address the biggest challenges facing health and care, improving outcomes, increasing productivity and driving economic growth.

Working across the NHS, industry, academia and government, we combine national coordination with specialist, boots-on-the-ground implementation expertise and deep local relationships to accelerate the adoption and spread of innovation. By identifying promising solutions, generating evidence, supporting implementation and scaling proven approaches, we help ensure innovations reach more patients, more quickly. Together, we deliver local change with national impact.

As a national network:

• We are the health innovation adoption experts. Healthcare’s biggest global problem is not invention. It is adoption at scale. The Health Innovation Network exists to solve that problem systematically across the NHS, and deliver improved outcomes, productivity and economic growth through innovation adoption.  
• We find, test, implement and scale innovations with the potential to tackle the NHS’ greatest challenges and ambitions, including the “three shifts”, and improving NHS productivity.  
• We deliver Local Change, National Impact. We are a national network of 15 local organisations that bring together the NHS, industry, academia and the third sector to help drive health innovation across the NHS, at pace and scale. Our place-based structures and specialist innovation capabilities mean we are uniquely positioned to support local health systems to deliver priority transformation projects in locally relevant ways, so everybody benefits. Each health innovation network has been embedded in their local health and research ecosystem for over a decade, enabling us to drive change at place-level while contributing to national policy agendas.  
• We improve patient outcomes, increase productivity and drive economic growth. Our latest impact figures, released June 2026, demonstrate this. 

Collective impact

As a result of the Network’s collective efforts:

• More than 7 million patients have benefited from our national and local programmes since 2020 
• More than 740k hours of healthcare staff capacity have been released through our programmes and initiatives since 2020  
• More than £4.4bn in investment leveraged for places, regions and innovators since 2018
• More than 12,600 jobs created or safeguarded through our support to innovators since 2018
• Our support to innovators delivers a 3:1 return on investment (using Treasury Green Book methodology).

In 2025/26 specifically:

• More than 1 million patients have benefited from our national and local programmes 
• We supported more than 2,300 innovators, creating or safeguarding over 1,500 jobs and leveraging almost £1.5bn in investment.