Adoption, not invention: why healthcare's next pivot is about system
Writing in Capital Club Dubai's Capital Insights magazine, former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock argues that the hard problem in healthcare is no longer inventing new tools but getting proven ones into use. A digital health leader from Jordan, a Dubai innovation researcher and a former Accenture partner reach the same conclusion from the ground up.
This is the last of three articles on the Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Insights. Part one covered the UAE economy [https://thefintechtimes.com/from-scale-to-value-how-the-uae-turns-every-shock-into-infrastructure/] and part two covered leadership [https://disrupts.disruptsmedia.com/sustainability/playbook-expired-what-leaders-who-have-lived-through-real-crises-do].
The transformation section of the new Capital Insights is where the edition's theme meets technology, and the healthcare pieces make the sharpest case. The science, the contributors agree, is not the bottleneck. The systems around it are.
The science has outrun the system
Matt Hancock was the UK's Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during Covid-19 and is now Chairman of Havilland Health and Managing Partner of Havilland Active Ventures. His starting point is the moment in every crisis when the old model stops working and everyone in the room knows it. During the pandemic that meant new supply chains overnight, tests people administered at home, a vaccine programme built from scratch and an app that could tell people they were at risk before their GP could. The lesson he took from it is that a reset is not a single event but a convergence of pressures, and healthcare is entering another one now, with AI as the catalyst. Read Matt Hancock's full article in Capital Insights
The paradox he describes will be familiar to anyone building in health tech. AI models can find cancers clinicians missed on the same scan, GLP-1 therapies have reshaped obesity treatment, and genomics can predict which patients will respond to which drug. Yet a therapy proven safe and effective can still take years to reach routine practice, because the system built to absorb innovation was designed for a slower century. The NHS AI Lab he set up backed tools that went on to help detect sepsis earlier and flag cancers read as normal, and its main lesson was that adoption needs deliberate infrastructure: funding pathways, procurement routes, navigable regulation and a willingness to let good tools scale quickly.
Workforce makes the point for him. He cites a March 2023 figure of roughly 112,000 NHS vacancies, an 8 per cent rate, in a country that sits below the OECD average for doctors per head; the magazine notes the rate has since eased to around 6.7 per cent. No funding settlement closes a structuralshortfall of that scale on its own, he argues, because you cannot recruit your way out of a design problem.
Data as the pivot point
Every reset Hancock has been part of in health came back to data. His 2018 Future of Healthcare vision set minimum technical standards and created NHSX to stop the NHS buying disconnected systems locally, and Covid then showed that the real constraint on transformation had been permission rather than technology. He argues that health data should belong to patients rather than the institutions that first recorded it, and that done with the right safeguards and open standards, a single, universal health system becomes a great asset: a connected, longitudinal dataset that few countries could ever assemble.
His prescription has three parts that must happen together: build the data infrastructure and standards before the services that depend on them; create demand-led adoption pathways that pull tested innovation in quickly instead of revalidating it at every step; and treat patients as active participants, with wearables, continuous monitoring and AI assistants freeing clinicians to spend their expertise on judgement. With demand growing exponentially and most health systems responding linearly, the only real question, he concludes, is whether systems shape the shift themselves or have it forced on them.
Lessons from the field
Dr Laith Hashem Al-Nsour, a healthcare leader whose 15 years of experience include serving as Chief of Telemedicine Services for Primary Health Care at the Jordan Digital Health Centre within the Ministry of Health, shows what that looks like on the ground. Nobody, he notes, taught digital transformation at medical school; his team learned it in the clinic. Read Dr Laith Hashem Al-Nsour's full article in Capital Insights
When his health centre introduced a queue-management system, the software worked from day one, but the queues simply moved, because patients and staff did not know their new roles. The fix was redesigning the workflow at the point of entry, not tuning the software. That led to a patient journey committee, a link to the electronic health record, shorter registration times, far less paperwork and the conversion of the medical records room into an evening pharmacy. Electronic payment went from minority practice to the dominant method within months by keeping alternatives open during the transition.
His second lesson came from telemedicine referrals. Too many patients reached cardiology, endocrinology and nutrition consultations without the tests or working diagnosis they needed, turning one visit into two. The problem is not unique to Jordan: published studies from the region found 31.5 per cent of paediatric ENT referrals at one Riyadh hospital and 34.9 per cent of referrals to a Qatar wellness service judged inappropriate, though he notes such findings must be read in their own settings. Before reaching for a technical fix, his team reset the standard: what should govern a referral, and who owns it. Only then did it consider an AI-supported referral-readiness check that flags missing elements for human review. Patients, he concludes, do not adapt to systems; systems must adapt to patients.
The same lesson outside healthcare
Two other contributors show that the pattern is not unique to medicine.
Dr Hend Hussain Sultan AlJunaidy, Innovation Manager at Neptune Energy Trading and formerly of DEWA, studied how collaboration platforms affect innovation in Dubai's service-sector SMEs for her PhD, surveying 384 employees and interviewing ten senior leaders. Used well, the platforms explained around 61 per cent of the variation in social innovation performance, but internal conditions, meaning leadership commitment, staff digital capability and organisational readiness, were roughly twice as influential on meaningful adoption as competitive or regulatory pressure. High platform activity, she warns, can signal overload as easily as value. Her advice is to invest in readiness before platforms, and to measure ideas implemented rather than logins. Read Dr Hend Hussain Sultan AlJunaidy's full article in Capital Insights
Kris Wadia, a board director and former Accenture partner who has advised Fortune 500 companies in 83 countries, writes for GCC digital businesses under pressure from events in the Strait of Hormuz. He cites McKinsey and IMF research showing that digitally mature businesses suffer smaller revenue falls and recover faster in downturns, and sets out a practical playbook built on liquidity, smarter selling and leaner operations, from faster collections and SaaS consolidation to retention bundles and IP registration. His reminder that cash, not revenue, is reality applies as much to a health tech start-up as to any software firm. Read Kris Wadia's full article in Capital Insights
Reset the diagnosis, then digitise
Across the four pieces, technology is never the hero. The tools work; what decides the outcome is whether the data, standards, processes and leadership around them are ready to use them. That is a message health systems, regulators and investors in the region would do well to take into 2027.
The full articles, and the rest of the Reset & Pivot edition, are available in Capital Insights. Read the full Reset & Pivot edition of Capital Insights
About Capital Club Dubai and Capital Insights
Capital Insights is the members' magazine of Capital Club Dubai, the private business club at Gate Village in the Dubai International Financial Centre. For nearly two decades the Club has brought together senior leaders, investors, family businesses and policymakers through closed-door forums, roundtables and structured introductions, and its members have access to more than 300 reciprocal clubs worldwide. The Biotech Times is proud to support the distribution of Capital Insights. capitalclubdubai.com