Concentric is an innovation part of the Grow Digital Health Midlands 2026 cohort. We spoke to Dr Patrick Hart, Growth and Partnerships Clinician at Concentric. This blog shares insight into their innovation, next steps, their biggest piece of advice innovating in the NHS and their plans for the future. 

Tell us about the innovation. At Concentric, we are transforming the experience of consent and shared decision-making for clinicians and patients. Concentric is built for informed consent, not form-filling. A structured process that supports genuine shared decision-making, with the patient at the centre. Clinicians work from a library of 3,000+ evidence based procedure templates, aligned with national guidance, which they personalise to each patient's specific circumstances. Consent information can then be digitally shared with the patient, allowing them to review the risks, benefits, and alternatives in their own time; not rushed on the day of surgery. It's designed to be deeply embedded into clinical workflows and electronic health record environments, so that consent is not an added task, but part of how care is delivered.

This matters because consent is about far more than a signature, it's about trust, safety, and partnership. Concentric is the market-leading digital consent application, accounting for around 70% of digital consent activity in the UK, used by 15,000+ clinicians each week and supporting over two million patients a year.

What are the plans/next steps for this innovation? The immediate opportunity is breadth. Around half of the NHS still uses paper consent, so much of the job ahead is simply reaching the clinicians and patients who don't yet have this. The evidence that the change is worth making is already there – independent evaluations show 7+ minutes saved per consent episode, a 5% reduction in day-of-treatment delays and cancellations, and gold-standard shared decision-making rising from 28% to 72%. The next step is extending those benefits to more organisations, and deeper within the ones we already work with. The other direction is depth: making consent itself better, not just more widely used. That means richer medical illustration to help patients picture what a procedure actually involves, trusted translation so language isn't a barrier to informed consent, and beginning to capture real-world outcome data — including patient-reported complications – at scale. Consent is a more complex problem than it first appears, and there's a lot still to build.

What’s your biggest piece of learning from innovating in the NHS? That the hardest part is rarely the technology – it's getting good innovation adopted, which turns out to be a discipline in its own right!

, and the risks of getting it wrong sit with them. Earning that change takes respect for their expertise, a clear evidence-based case, and patience with the pace the NHS needs to move at. I've come to see that this work, the adoption, not just the building, is as much our product as the software itself.

What are your hopes for the future? My hope is that we can change what consent means. Even in advanced hospitals, it's too often a signature collected under time pressure. I'd like to reach a point where every patient, wherever they're treated, has a real conversation about their care, with information personalised to them rather than a generic leaflet, and comes away feeling like an equal partner in the decision.

What excites me most is where that's heading: using real-world outcome data to show patients risks based on people like them, not population averages. Get that right, and consent stops being a formality and becomes one of the most valuable conversations in medicine.

What’s the best part of your job? The variety is definitely a big part of it. Coming from a clinical background, I still work alongside clinicians every day, but in a very different way to traditional practice – one day I'm reviewing clinical content, the next I'm talking to a health system about adoption and shaping new product features.

But the best part is when the scale of what we do suddenly becomes personal. Concentric supports over two million patients a year, and it's easy for that to stay an abstract number, until you meet one of them. I recently got chatting to a woman in a pub who overheard me mention Concentric, and it turned out she'd used it herself as a patient. She told me all about her experience. Moments like that, when a figure in a report turns into a real person standing in front of you, are what make it worthwhile.

How do you feel the Grow programme will support you and your innovation? Concentric is already a mature, proven solution, deployed in routine clinical care across the NHS. So for us, Grow isn't about early-stage support; it's about scale.

The real opportunity is moving from Trust-by-Trust deployment to coordinated regional adoption across the Midlands, the largest NHS region in England. Growing one Trust at a time is slower than the opportunity warrants. The Grow programme can help us go faster in three ways: connecting us with Midlands ICSs and Trusts so we can align digital consent with their elective recovery and digital strategies; supporting independent, multi-site evaluation that strengthens the case for wider adoption; and giving us the chance to work alongside regional transformation programmes and learn from the rest of the cohort.

We also come to it with something to give: real-world deployment experience across dozens of NHS organisations, and a commitment to sharing our implementation frameworks and outcomes data openly. So it should help us move faster, reduce duplication, and demonstrate system-level value across the Midlands and beyond.

Find out more about Concentric on their Grow Digital Health Midlands webpage.