With the NHS under unprecedented pressure and healthcare innovators increasingly looking to primary care as a launchpad, understanding the inner workings of this vital pillar of the UK healthcare system is more essential than ever.
In this one-hour live session, Dr. Faris Al-Ramadani — GP partner, former PCN Clinical Director, and digital health consultant — joined Dr. Derrick Khor to unravel the complex structures, opportunities, and challenges within NHS primary care. The goal? To arm healthtech founders with the real-world knowledge necessary to design, position, and implement solutions that primary care actually needs.
At the heart of NHS primary care lies the GP practice — independent businesses operating under NHS contracts (typically GMS contracts), providing frontline care to millions.
Dr. Al-Ramadani provided a foundational overview:
He emphasized that each layer has differing levels of agility, funding access, and procurement complexity. For innovators, understanding who holds the purse strings and decision-making power is key.
The procurement dynamics vary drastically:
The takeaway? Tailor your go-to-market strategy depending on your solution’s scale, complexity, and intended user. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work.
Healthtech must solve real problems. Dr. Al-Ramadani outlined the three biggest pain points facing GP surgeries:
Innovators who align with these pressure points will find a warmer reception — especially if they clearly articulate the value of their solution in relieving these burdens.
Healthtech companies often struggle with pricing. Dr. Al-Ramadani’s advice was crisp:
“Understand your value. If you price high, show your value is higher.”
He broke this down with a powerful example:
Your value case must speak to each stakeholder in the ecosystem — GP, PCN, and ICB — in their own language. Economic evidence matters just as much as clinical outcomes.
Perhaps the most exciting part of the session was the discussion on Integrated Neighborhood Teams — NHS England’s vision for truly community-based care.
This is the future:
Right now, INTs are in their infancy. But the opportunity is massive:
“Whoever builds the connective tissue between these teams — shared comms, shared records, shared workflows — will likely do very, very well.”
Dr. Khor predicted the emergence of a lightweight, platform-level solution that stitches together disparate providers and data sources.
Tech that merely slots into broken workflows may fail. Instead, Dr. Al-Ramadani advocated for co-designing new care pathways with providers:
For example, rather than just selling a messaging platform, design and deliver the communication pathway that replaces the phone-tag chaos between nurses and GPs.
Dr. Al-Ramadani listed key domains where innovation is not just welcome — it’s desperately needed:
Final reflections from both speakers revolved around a critical point: solutions that endure are built slowly, with evidence.
Companies like See the Signs didn’t scale overnight. They collected local evidence, proved value, and only then scaled nationally.
So the advice was clear:
This session was an essential masterclass for any healthtech innovator serious about primary care.
It wasn’t just an overview of acronyms and procurement pathways — it was a call to build more thoughtfully, more humbly, and more collaboratively. Primary care doesn't need more products. It needs the right ones — delivered in the right way.
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