NICE is right: Digital health should be treated like medicines — but we have to make it work in practice

I strongly believe NICE’s vision to put digital health and MedTech on the same footing as medicines is absolutely the right one.

For a long time, we’ve accepted a strange imbalance in healthcare. Medicines are assessed, approved, prescribed, reimbursed and monitored nationally. Digital health technologies — even those with strong clinical evidence — are often left stuck in pilots, short-term funding, or local decision-making. That leads to variation, slow uptake, and missed opportunities for patients.

So the move to bring digital and AI health technologies into a statutory NICE appraisal and adoption pathway makes complete sense. Many digital tools now have real evidence, clear clinical benefit and system impact. They should be reimbursed. They should be prescribed. And patients should be able to access them consistently, regardless of where they live.

We fully support this vision.

My concern, however, has always been the same one: a strong vision needs a practical delivery model, or it risks stalling.

The real challenges are very practical:

• How will NICE scale evidence assessments for a fast-moving digital market?

• How will NHS organisations clearly know what is and isn’t NICE-approved?

• How will they know what is DTAC-approved — which is critical for safety and assurance?

• How will clinicians know what they can prescribe, and how to prescribe it?

• How will reimbursement work in practice?

• And what happens if new evidence shows a technology is no longer safe or effective?

These are not small details — they are the things that determine whether policy turns into real-world impact.

When I founded ORCHA, it was exactly this comparison with medicines that shaped what we built. We asked: if digital health is going to be treated like drugs, where is the infrastructure to support that?

So we focused on creating:

• scalable, consistent digital health assurance

• clear access through integrated “formularies” of approved technologies

• digital prescribing that clinicians can use confidently

• mechanisms to support reimbursement and track funding

• ongoing monitoring so technologies can change, improve — or be withdrawn — as evidence evolves

In short, we’ve been building the prescription infrastructure for digital health, because parity with medicines doesn’t work without it.

No single organisation can solve this alone. If anything, this moment calls for better collaboration — between NICE, the NHS, innovators and infrastructure partners — so we don’t just agree on the destination, but also on how we get there.

The vision is right.
The evidence is there.
Now we need to make sure the system is ready to deliver it.