Dr Benyamin Deldar, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur and founder of Deep Medical – which is using AI to address missed appointments – responds to the NHS Ten Year Plan and innovation culture in the health service.

The spread and adoption of new technology and innovation remain among the biggest challenges facing the NHS. One of the largest barriers is also clinical time, with the Darzi review highlighting the problem of NHS staff experiencing technology as an additional burden that can sometimes fail to align with their immediate clinical priorities.

Benyamin Deldar is one of the NHS’s clinical entrepreneurs and co-founder of Deep Medical, a company using AI tools to tackle missed appointments – one of the NHS’s hidden operational crises. Deldar has experienced first-hand how difficult it can be to match new innovation with clinical understanding and priorities. “I’ve seen it throughout my clinical career: expensive solutions brought into hospitals that simply don’t align with how we work on the ground. An example of this is electronic health records in the US which started off as tools to help the American healthcare system bill, and so aren’t best suited for reducing friction or improving patient care.” he explains.

Deldar is a graduate of the NHS’s Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, designed, as he puts it, “to empower clinicians to build from the ground up, not top down.” The two-year programme offers “pit stops” throughout the course, covering startup principles. “As clinicians, we’re rarely taught how to build businesses, navigate legal frameworks, or pitch to stakeholders. One of the programme’s strengths is matching those skills with innovations that can fit into NHS workflows.”

Deep Medical is now one of the most promising innovations in the NHS. Initially trialled at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust in 2023, the AI-powered system uses behavioural and environmental data to predict appointment no-shows and organise appropriate interventions. It is now operating across 5 sites, having enabled over 45000 extra appointments

Deldar, who sat on the Innovation Advisory Board contributing to the NHS’s Ten Year Plan, highlights that while the UK excels at inventiveness, spread and adoption remain fundamental barriers to the government’s vision for NHS reform. “We’re world-class at generating ideas – some of the first globally to use AI in this space – but we don’t yet have a functioning system to support scale. The NHS is more like navigating a franchise model where every hospital wants its own pilot. That’s two years per site. At scale, it’s unworkable.”

Such concerns have clearly informed the plan’s proposals. The new Innovator Passport aims to eliminate redundant compliance assessments across the 215 NHS trusts in England. In theory, once a product is approved by one NHS organisation, it can then be rolled out across others without repeated assessments, accelerating access to innovative treatments and processes for patients.

For Deldar, these structural changes are essential – having worked in the NHS first-hand, working closely with those at the forefront of innovation is hugely beneficial. Hospitals that have implemented Deep Medical’s AI have already enabled over 45,000 appointments at five sites, saving the NHS £27.5 million.  

His clinical background has helped him identify and address genuine frontline pain points – an approach he believes should be encouraged more systematically through the expansion of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme. He credits the programme for introducing him to mentors with a background in NHS management like Patrick Mitchell (former Head of Innovation at Health Education England), with helping to scale ideas into system-level change. “You don’t just need money. You need the right tribe of people who understand the system and can open doors.”

Yet funding remains a persistent bottleneck – particularly for preventative technologies aiming to use AI, where the return on investment may fall outside conventional commissioning timeframes. “The NHS is still set up to pay for acute care, not incentivised interventions to avoid hospital visits or reduce long-term risk.” This is something the Ten Year Plan hopes to address, with organisations now required to reserve at least 3% of their budgets for one-off investments within multi-year budgets to support longer-term strategic thinking.

How successful will this be? The transformation envisaged is still in its early days, but Deldar remains broadly optimistic about the transformative potential of AI in healthcare and the ongoing empowerment of innovative clinicians. “Just five years ago, we wouldn’t even have been talking about this. There’s so much opportunity – particularly with AI – from addressing socio-economic disparities to tailoring care at the genetic level. But we also need ethical frameworks built from first principles, based on what can go wrong, not just what we hope will go right.”

July 2025