The NHS is changing. Is your healthcare marketing keeping up?

If you provide medical devices, diagnostics or health technology to the NHS, you will likely be aware of some significant shifts in the last eighteen months. Here’s a recap on some of the fundamental changes:

• NHS England is being abolished, with its functions transferring to the Department of Health and Social Care under the Health Bill introduced to Parliament in May 2026
• Integrated care boards are merging and being reshaped as strategic commissioners, with changes taking effect in April 2026 and April 2027
• In June 2026, national standard guidance on value-based procurement for medical technology was published, which changes how products are scored when it reaches evaluation

Some MedTech organisations are on it and have adapted their brand and marketing strategies accordingly – whilst some are playing catch up. The buying environment has changed quickly, and much of it has changed in places marketing has never had good visibility of. But the implications are commercial, and they are significant.

Value now has a formal definition, and a weighting

Value now having a formal definition, and a weighting, is one of the most concrete changes, which brings a clear brand and marketing consequence.

The value-based procurement national standard guidance for medical technology, published on 11 June 2026, sets out five value domains: social value, efficiency, patient and staff, supply chain, and purpose. Those five domains must together carry a minimum weighting of 60% in the evaluation. Whole-life cost is assessed separately and capped at 40%.

In a compliant evaluation, then, at least 60% of your score comes from something other than the price on your quotation.

That is a big opportunity, and most providers are not positioned to capitalise on this. If your marketing evidences clinical performance and your commercial team evidences price, you are competing hard in the two places the guidance has deliberately made less decisive. Social value, pathway efficiency, staff impact and supply chain resilience are now scored categories. Someone has to give the evaluator the material to score them, and if it is not you, it will be a competitor.

I would treat those five domains as strategic messaging and content pillars. What do you have that speaks to each one, where does it live, and could a procurement lead find it without calling your sales team?

The buying group has grown, and it is not all clinical

The person who uses your device is rarely the person who decides to adopt it. That has always been true to a degree, but as care is planned around pathways and populations, the group involved has widened considerably.

Clinical teams, procurement, finance, operational leads, commissioners and transformation teams can all shape the outcome, and they are not looking for the same thing. A clinician wants to know whether the technology improves clinical outcomes. Procurement wants to understand cost, supply and value against those five domains. An operational lead is thinking about workflow and capacity. Finance wants the wider economic picture.

Most MedTech marketing is still built for the first of those conversations. If your campaign speaks only to the end user, you are missing the other stakeholders in the buying journey.

You might be leaving your clinical advocate to translate your proposition into finance and operational language on your behalf, usually without the numbers to do it, and usually in a meeting you are not in.

Your evidence needs to work as a set, not a stack

Clinical evidence is essential and non-negotiable. It is also, on its own, not enough to support an adoption decision.

A clinical paper proves a diagnostic is accurate. A case study shows what happened when someone implemented it. Real-world data demonstrates the effect on a pathway. Health economic evidence builds the business case. Individually each is a valuable document.

The marketing job is not to turn evidence into promotional material. It is to make good evidence findable, readable and relevant to whichever person in that group has picked it up – which is a different discipline and one most MedTech marketing functions have not been resourced for.

Make the case before procurement, not during it

Procurement has traditionally been treated as something that happens after marketing and sales have done their work. I think that needs to change.

By the time an NHS organisation is seriously considering your technology, your marketing should already have helped them build the internal case. Can they see the financial value? Can they understand the impact on staff time? Can they find the evidence without asking you for it? Can they explain the investment to the people holding the budget?

If your sales team is constructing that argument from scratch every time they reach procurement, then there is a marketing problem.

Prevention and care closer to home changes what your market is

The 10-Year Health Plan set out three shifts: hospital to community, treatment to prevention, and analogue to digital. All three create openings for technology that supports a different model of care, and the third is the one health tech marketing tends to under-use.

The plan commits to remote monitoring for cardiovascular disease becoming standard NHS care by 2028, and to wearables becoming standard in preventative, chronic and post-acute care. Neighbourhood health centres are intended to operate at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, with the ambition that most outpatient care happens outside hospitals by 2035.

That is a different question from the one most MedTech propositions answer. Instead of asking who uses our technology, ask where our technology could help the NHS deliver care differently.

A diagnostic positioned around laboratory efficiency may have a much larger role supporting earlier diagnosis in community settings. A monitoring device framed around keeping patients out of hospital is a stronger commercial proposition than one framed around the act of monitoring. The technology has not changed, but the market has.

Where NHS decision-makers look first

NHS buyers research independently, and they do it early. They search for solutions to problems, look for evidence, compare technologies and form a view on relevance long before they contact a supplier.

Gartner’s sales survey published in March 2026 found that 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, and that 45% had used AI during a recent purchase. Your website and your published evidence are doing the early selling.

With AI increasingly sitting between the buyer and the answer, being visible is no longer the bar. You need to be the source specific and credible enough to be cited when someone asks a question about the problem you solve.

Five actions I would take

1. Remap the buying group. Go beyond the clinical user and map everyone who influences, evaluates and approves adoption, then be honest about which of them your current marketing actually reaches.
2. Audit your content against the five value domains. Take social value, efficiency, patient and staff, supply chain and purpose, and work out what evidence you hold for each. The gaps are your content plan.
3. Reposition around the pathway, not the product. Ask what your technology removes, reduces or enables for the NHS, and lead with that rather than with a specification.
4. Make your evidence findable. Your website should let a procurement or finance lead build their case during the evening without physically speaking to anyone.
5. Arm your sales team with the whole argument. Sales enablement should equip your team for clinical, operational, procurement and financial conversations, with the evidence and messaging each one needs.

From awareness to adoption

The NHS does not need more products. It needs answers to some very hard problems around capacity, workforce, cost, waiting times and prevention.

That is the opportunity for suppliers who can show where their technology fits inside those problems and what changes as a result. The shift I would make is from marketing a product to supporting an adoption decision, which means understanding the challenge, knowing who influences the outcome, building a proposition around value as it is now formally defined, and handing people the evidence to take the next step.

The question is no longer whether the NHS knows your technology exists. It is whether you have made it straightforward for them to justify adopting it.

Looking for a partner to help sharpen your healthcare marketing for the way the NHS buys now? Get in touch to chat about your positioning, evidence and digital marketing strategy.

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