Thought Leadership

The recent government announcement that HM Treasury will conduct a cross-government review into wasteful duplication signals a clear priority: eliminating waste in the NHS. The Autumn Budget 2025 set the direction, and the Treasury review follows through, focusing on a critical area—the shift of healthcare back into communities. The message is clear. Waste isn’t a future problem. It’s costing the NHS £20 billion a year right now.

The review puts a spotlight on what frontline teams already know. Working in silos across community care, primary care, mental health and social care creates inefficiency. Different systems that don’t talk to each other. Duplicate assessments. Patients falling through gaps while resources flow to the wrong places. The shift to community care was meant to ease hospital pressure and bring care closer to home. Yet without intelligent coordination, it’s only creating new layers of waste.

Manual oversight cannot keep pace. Investigators spend weeks uncovering patterns that real-time analytics surface in seconds. With NHS managing record caseloads and services are expanding into thousands of community touchpoints, this gap between effort and insight becomes increasingly problematic. Waste metastasises while teams are still processing last month’s data.

AI-powered detection offers a proven alternative. US state healthcare agencies using Pulselight’s AI-powered analytics have detected and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars across populations comparable to UK regions. In one state serving 3.6 million people, the technology identified $59 million in recoveries and $277 million in waste within the first year, delivering $170 million in cost savings over two years. The NHS faces the same challenges at similar scale. The technology exists. The results are proven.

The policy window is open, the Treasury’s review on waste is asking the right questions and setting the right direction. The NHS is transforming how and where it delivers care. Waste detection capabilities must evolve at the same pace, or the shift to community care will create the very inefficiencies it was designed to solve.