Smart Technology for Healthcare: Beyond the Buzzword

Digital technology in healthcare refers to solutions like electronic patient records, telehealth platforms, and patient portals. These are solutions that use computing and are designed to improve workflows or the access to healthcare.

Smart technology in healthcare is the next step in the evolution of digital tech. It uses the data captured digitally and can extrapolate facts and figures and present analysis and predictions. This artificial intelligence can range from machine learning – habits and pattern recognition – to generative AI, whereby the smart technology is able to contribute of its own accord. Its programming instructs it to take supportive action and anticipate needs, whether that’s optimising finances or supporting clinical decision making.

To give an example, Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust uses AI technology to detect lung cancer. Speaking to BBC News, Dr Daniel Fascia – a consultant radiologist at HDFT - said: “This technology will greatly speed up the time it takes for clinicians across our trusts to accurately report and diagnose each X-ray, helping us to reduce historical backlogs in our organisations”. This tallies with what the UK Parliament website confirmed back in September 2025, that a new £21 million AI diagnostic fund had been established to support the deployment of this new technology, and that the NHS was also upgrading its MRI scanners to handle new, smart software.

This is not to say smart technology is purely AI-based, however. Plenty of software is smart without it. The definition revolves around the principle that the solution is transforming current digital outcomes, and that can be achieved without AI but through means of introducing interoperability with other programmes. What may once have been an isolated bit of software could now, thanks to smart technology, communicate and cooperate with other solutions.

Interoperability describes the ability of healthcare systems, or software, to use and communicate information from one solution to another.

Smart systems thrive on connectivity. Interoperability ensures that data flows seamlessly across platforms, providers, and geographies, enabling holistic patient care. The alternative is data silos, and that’s a challenge that’s currently high on the agenda of health and care providers to resolve.

The problem is that isolated data means duplication of effort and records. This increases workload but also risk, as humans make errors. By enabling systems to communicate, duplication can be reduced and clinicians can constantly review patient records and healthcare data to ensure accuracy. A single source of the truth, accessible from multiple angles.

This touches on the bigger point: that smart technology is designed to remove administrative burden, not just digitise it. Electronic records and messages and data are beneficial, there’s no denying that, but healthcare professionals need more support in managing their workloads, and that’s where smart software solutions come in.

Smart technology is one buzz phrase, and artificial intelligence is another. AI was once the plaything of sci-fi writers and is now present in everyday life; capturing data and analysing it in order to produce predictions to help work efficiency or forecasts to help bigger picture strategy.

In healthcare, AI is working in a few areas:

1. Data analytics and forecasting
2. Patient engagement and queries
3. Advanced imaging and detection

1) Data – AI is collating large volumes of data available, to produce ever more detailed diagnostics. This helps with predictive analytics about population health and their needs but also can then direct spending or pre-empt any issues that might affect local people.

2) Patients – AI is also helping with query management, answering questions patients may have and passing on more complex requests to healthcare professionals. It’s also able to proactively inform patients at a GP surgery or within an NHS Trust about appointments and test results.

3) Detection – Perhaps the most exciting aspect is AI’s usage in advanced imaging. We’ve already touched upon its usage in x-rays earlier in this blog, but that ability to spot early warning signs for diseases could help the NHS and other healthcare providers save lives – and even save money doing it.

Preventative care is the next step for modern healthcare; treating problems as they arise rather than when they become impactful or damaging to a person’s wellbeing. The challenge for solution providers however, is that artificial intelligence isn’t without risk. Human bias can influence algorithms, which can then cause inequality for patient care. Transparency is required in both the design and deployment phases to ensure scrutiny and that corrections can be made.

At Access, we have an ethical AI board for this reason; ensuring that Access Evo works for staff and patients rather than against them.

Smart technology should enhance human activity. It should account for different levels digital literacy and experience with technology.

At Access, we design our systems with clinical input. Our rationale is that systems designed without clinician input can see issues with workflow and operational suitability, which then can lead to errors and frustrations and that is a domino effect for impacting care quality and staff retention.

By creating solutions with an intuitive, human-centric design, we the solutions providers are prioritising usability and accessibility, which then ensures that new technology doesn’t overwhelm already incumbered staff. 

Through intuitive development, solutions providers can deliver fairer healthcare, but there’s a valid concern about creating new inequalities.

Smart technology has the power to democratise healthcare. Remote monitoring and telehealth can bring services to underserved communities, reducing geographic barriers, but issues with digital literacy amongst patients and socio-economic issues around poorer regions and limited funding risks opening a digital divide.

Case in point, figures from NHS England (and Ofcom) on digital exclusion and health literacy say:

• 7% of households lack internet access
• Around 1 million people cancelled their broadband package in the last 12 months due to rising costs
• Around 10 million adults are estimated to lack foundation-level digital skills
• Around 30% of people who are offline feel that the NHS is one of the most difficult organisations to interact with

Without inclusive design and policy, innovation risks leaving vulnerable populations behind. Ethical implementation isn’t optional, it’s essential, and failure to account for the users as well as the clinicians is just a box ticking exercise. Smart technology needs patient engagement if it’s to fulfil its potential and support better care, so it needs to be accommodating of their wants, needs, and capabilities. 

Smart technology is a great next step, but it isn’t a panacea. Many tools can transform healthcare delivery, smart or not. Success depends on thoughtful implementation and appropriate developments. 

Interoperability is constantly coming back to us as the key ‘want’ of NHS Trusts and other providers. They want solutions to integrate into their existing healthcare systems.

The objective has to be better outcomes for patients and staff. Put people first – in software functionality, in optimising workflows, and in supporting patient engagement. Do this, with AI and with smart technology, and you’ll get better results.