Curia's September 2026 Report Asks HM Treasury for a Five-Year NHS Program in AI, Data and Quantum, With Quantum Sensing for Diagnostics First

A UK investment case for AI, data and quantum in the NHS, published September 2026

Quentir Medicine Monitor

Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.

Any innovator who has tried to sell a new diagnostic to the NHS knows the first obstacle is finding the door. Lord Kamall, who served as the UK's minister for technology, innovation and life sciences, opens Curia's new report with exactly that memory: start-ups knocking at primary care, at hospital trusts and at integrated care systems, with some getting in and others giving up and taking their product abroad.

The report, AI, Data, and Quantum in UK Healthcare: From Evidence to Investment, was published by the policy group Curia in September 2026 and written with HM Treasury as its first reader. It grew out of a parliamentary roundtable hosted by Lord Kamall, now Shadow Minister for Health and Social Care, and chaired by Professor Gillian Leng, former chief executive of NICE and president of the Royal Society of Medicine. Speakers included Lawrence Tallon, chief executive of the MHRA; Sir Peter Knight, who chairs the strategy advisory board of the UK's national quantum technologies program; Roger McKinlay, chair of UKQuantum; Michael Cuthbert, director of the NQCC, the UK's national laboratory for quantum computing; Nicola Hodson of IBM UK and Ireland; and Lara Jehi of Cleveland Clinic, who joined online.

Its central request is a five-year national program that treats AI, health data, classical computing and quantum technology as one capability organized around named NHS problems. The ordering inside that capability is the part a hospital buyer should notice first. The report puts quantum sensing for imaging and diagnostics ahead of quantum computing in time, and it calls data quality the foundation everything else depends on.

Politics UK summarized the report on 20 October 2026. Curia stresses in its own text that the roundtable was a "light-touch expert affirmation and challenge" of its direction, and that participants did not endorse the program design or the recommendations, which Curia developed afterwards from the discussion and published evidence.

That caveat matters for how the document should be read. It is an investment case written by a policy group, informed by senior people from the regulator, the national quantum program and industry, and it carries their themes without carrying their signatures.