If we fast forward five years, how will the standard patient journey have changed because of your work?
Dr Tuckey: The UK faces significant challenges in imaging capacity, and delays in diagnosis can have a major impact on patient outcomes. The UK has one of the lowest numbers of scanners per capita among developed countries, alongside comparatively poor cancer survival rates relative to countries like Australia, Canada and Norway. Those issues are closely linked. Over the next five years, we hope to help create a patient experience where imaging is faster, clearer and better integrated with the wider healthcare system. Instead of waiting 6-12 weeks for a scan, patients should be able to access diagnostics quickly, receive understandable results, and ensure urgent findings are escalated promptly. For some of our patients, getting a scan within 48 hours has meant catching something early enough to change the outcome. Early diagnosis isn’ t just a clinical metric – it’ s the difference between a manageable condition and a devastating one.
Dr Baker: The picture I’ d paint is a clinician who finishes their shift on time, looking at the patient, not the screen. Today, NHS clinicians lose up to 40 % of their time to admin. In five years, if not sooner, we’ ve got to give them that time back. If I think about the specifics, in five years I expect AI will be the invisible infrastructure behind every NHS consultation. Patients won’ t have to repeat their story five times across different systems, because the AI will have captured it in a structured data format as the foundation, available across the system. That means patients get to the right care quicker and clinicians can spend more time on care.
Dr King: I think we’ ll look back and wonder why so many treatments required hospital visits in the first place. The patient journey is steadily moving away from centralised care and towards treatment that fits around people’ s lives. Our vision is that therapies which currently require lengthy hospital infusions can instead be administered through simple injections at home. For patients, that means fewer disruptions, less travel, and greater independence. For healthcare systems, it means lower costs and more capacity. The manufacturing of these drugs may happen in orbit, but the impact will be felt in living rooms, pharmacies and communities across the world.
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