GUEST ARTICLE: Thoughts from Irene Manautou - CEO, Pulselight
Three weeks ago, Lord Bethell made headlines saying NHS spending has doubled in seventeen years to no measurable improvement in national health. It was a confronting thing to say publicly, but also the right thing to say.
I was privileged to sit alongside him at the Counter Fraud Conference, on a panel titled "The Efficiency Drive: How Technology Can Detect and Prevent Systemic Waste in the NHS", joined by Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Pulselight's VP of Product Strategy, Mallika Thanky. The conversation was frank, the room was engaged, and two weeks on I find myself thinking less about what was said and more about where the debate goes from here.
In some ways, the ground has already shifted. The question is no longer whether the NHS has a waste problem. The £20 billion lost annually to waste and inefficiency is not seriously contested, and HM Treasury's cross-government review into wasteful duplication reflects a government that knows it too. The question on my mind, and no doubt on everyone else's, is how we actually close that gap.
What we see at Pulselight is healthcare systems that are sitting on vast quantities of data but cannot yet act on it at the speed the challenge demands. Sir Jonathan put it well on the panel: the real challenge is joining data across organisations and turning it into insight that teams can use. That distance between data and decision is where billions are lost every year, not through bad intent but through systems that were never designed to see themselves whole.
I know what becomes possible when that changes. In one US state comparable in scale to a major UK region, our platform identified £210 million in waste in the first year and supported the recovery of £130 million within two years. The technology is proven and the challenge is identical.
The moment the UK is in right now is a real one. Political will, financial pressure, and a clear direction of travel do not come together often. With the 2025 Spending Review committing up to £10 billion to NHS technology and transformation, the infrastructure for change is being built. The opportunity is there. I genuinely believe the NHS can get ahead of this, and I'll be sharing more of my thinking on how in the weeks ahead.
To find out more about Pulselight, visit https://www.pulselight.com/uk/
Irene Manautou, Founder & CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irene-manautou/