The NICE Conference 2026: Collaborations in a Fast-Evolving Landscape

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Conference 2026 was held in Manchester on March 17^th, with policymakers, commissioners, patient advocates, and industry leaders among its attendees. On leaving the conference, one thing was clear to us: the world of health technology assessment (HTA) is changing at a rapid rate, and NICE is taking steps to stay ahead of the curve.

A few key themes stood out.

1. Assessment of a technology across its entire lifecycle is becoming the default as a result of shifting expectations away from a one-off evidence “snapshot” and toward a continuous evidence story.
2. The importance of preventive action was discussed at length, as was the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically large language models (LLMs) in HTA.
3. Collaboration between NICE and other regulatory and HTA agencies is key to streamlining processes and ensuring alignment.

Read on to find out our takeaways from the NICE Conference 2026 and their implications for manufacturers operating in the UK market.

Lifecycle assessment is becoming the norm

In an approach to increase the speed at which patients can access new therapies, NICE discussed how “whole lifecycle” assessment is becoming the standard operating model in its appraisals. This whole lifecycle approach refers to how initial decisions are made in the absence of mature data, with reassessment to come later as the evidence matures.

Central to this approach is the collection of real-world evidence once technologies are adopted. Real-world data can guide future assessment and negotiation around effectiveness and value, while also providing innovative and potentially life-saving therapies to patients sooner.

There was a focus on the possibility of revisiting medicines that were previously not recommended once off-patent, or once biosimilars enter the market – either as the intervention itself, or as relevant comparators in an indication. Biosimilars in particular were noted as having a rapid uptake in the UK currently, although this could potentially go further, with NHS England hoping to achieve £1 billion in savings from biosimilar switching. Such savings could then fund access to newer, higher-cost innovations elsewhere.

Prevention is increasingly recognized as essential

The concept that “prevention is better than cure” was discussed in terms of focusing on action to reduce risk factors in a way that is embedded across healthcare systems and communities. The NHS 10-Year Health Plan’s vision is to transform the UK health system to focus on preventive care in order to improve health outcomes and alleviate the burden of chronic conditions.

As a case study, the conference heard there is a need to re-frame obesity toward being an outcome shaped by environment and circumstances, rather than a simple individual choice. Reducing stigma and overcoming communication barriers is key to ensuring people engage with healthcare services. It was noted that inducing shame does not motivate people to make healthier choices and turns people away from healthcare. Thus, there is a clear need for a compassion-based approach that involves normalizing and de-stigmatizing conversations about healthy weight.

The scale of such a response needs to match the scale of the challenge. Effective policy action was discussed, with the sugar tax being cited as an example of a success story in the drinks market. While glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists that lower blood sugar, reduce appetite, and promote weight loss are positioned as important parts of the solution, implementation challenges and limited longer-term data mean that these alone are too narrow of a clinical lens to fully resolve the issue.

On a broader level the burden of disease is unequally distributed, with people in more deprived areas experiencing worse health outcomes including differences in life expectancy. This is partly due to limited access and is linked to other determinants such as housing, benefits/income, and education. Given that areas with the highest deprivation face the strongest barriers to healthy living, it was raised that an effective approach to tackling health inequalities would need to be community driven rather than entirely policy driven.

The increasing use of AI in HTA

Other topics were discussed around the need to “future-proof” the regulatory landscape, in anticipation of the increasing use of AI and LLMs in communicating the results of submissions. NICE framed such automation as necessary productivity tools, given the growing demand. This includes staying ahead of the curve in the use of AI in drug discovery and in diagnostics, although most adoption of new AI-based technologies is currently in image-based diagnostic products. To this end, an initiative to increase monitoring of the real-world impact of AI technologies in this space is ongoing, with a report expected in June.

This is uncharted territory, but standing still is not a viable option. NICE also stressed human-in-the-loop oversight and focus on “fidelity” of LLMs to preserve evidence accuracy and, above all, patient safety.

In conversation with NICE and the MHRA: “Faster and fairer”

Historically, regulatory approval and reimbursement decision making have occurred sequentially rather than in tandem, contributing to delays in patient access. However, the NHS 10-Year Health Plan is committed to modernizing and future-proofing regulatory bodies. This means NICE is aiming to deliver “faster and fairer” patient access to innovative treatments by minimizing – or eliminating entirely – the gap between regulatory approval and reimbursement decisions.

A new joint pathway between NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is intended to expedite patient access to new medicines by approximately 3–6 months. The pathway also aims to provide clarity for manufacturers regarding the expectations of submitted evidence and timelines. Reduced timelines would also have a commercial benefit to technology developers, owing to the product’s extended time on patent while on the market.

According to Professor Jonathan Benger, chief executive of NICE and a speaker at the conference, this is partly based on an ambition for the UK to become one of the fastest countries in the world to approve treatments. Indeed, two goals were announced:

1. To make the UK the fastest to approve new treatments in Europe.
2. To make the UK the third fastest to approve new treatments in the World.

International collaboration to develop and improve HTA methods

The NICE Conference 2026 also spotlighted how NICE is collaborating internationally. A conference session focused on the Health Economics Methods Advisory (HEMA) group, an independent body convened by NICE, Canada’s Drug Agency (CDA-AMC) and the US Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER). HEMA is designed to independently research and evaluate new methods and processes for HTA following the key principles of transparency, inclusivity, consistency, and impartiality. HEMA also offers advice and support to countries that are building up their own HTA agencies.

An example of HEMA’s work reviewed how to broaden the concept of “value” beyond the standard HTA endpoints. The work recommends that methods should better capture added benefit, by considering:

• Individuals’ attitudes toward risk when making treatment choices
• Promote a deeper understanding of how patients receive care and the many aspects that matter to them
• Modifiers and distributional impacts that better consider health equity – i.e. who benefits, and which decisions may increase or decrease health inequities
• Spillovers outside of health (such as impacts on education, productivity, or criminal justice-related outcomes) to give a broader perspective

However, it was emphasized that any broader set of outcomes or value elements must be relevant to decision-making bodies; appropriately valued (e.g. to avoid double-counting or over-weighting); and reflected in any opportunity cost that it may incur (i.e. what is displaced when funding one option over another). Pediatric medicine was noted to be a pressure point; hurdles for attaining successful recommendations for pediatric therapies due to the fact that value for children is harder to capture with standard tools.

Overall, there was a consensus that the health economics community is broadly aligned in the direction it is taking, but there remain differing world views and data limitations that inhibit completely successful adoption of strategies.

Re-designing NICE guidance for increased readability

At its conference, NICE put forward a clear goal to re-vamp its guidance: by 2027, it will be less dense, more actionable, and easier to navigate. The aim is to turn the guidance into something that can be used for day-to-day care decision making, rather than something people consult only when needed for a formal reference. This shift was framed as moving toward more user-friendly interfaces for use in real-world clinical settings; the Clinical Knowledge Summaries were given as an example of this in action. Also put forward was a longer-term vision for NICE to provide more personalized guidance accounting for comorbidities and patient preferences, to better support shared decision making.

For this to work in practice, ideas were discussed such as breaking guidance into modular blocks that can be reassembled, to make guidance changes clearer. It was highlighted that the materials behind a recommendation (i.e. rationale, evidence, Committee discussion) should be just a “click away”, rather than buried in large documents. The use of horizon scanning was mentioned to anticipate changes to guidance for rare conditions, and as a signpost to existing guidelines elsewhere. Regarding the use of AI to achieve these aims, NICE laid out the process of retrieval augmented generation using trusted sources only, as well as knowledge graphs to represent relationships between the data. Notably, there was an emphasis on human oversight and the existence of strong guardrails, as well as post-market surveillance, particularly for high-risk guidance (e.g. around dosing). NICE anticipates it will take 6–12-months to see the first results from this initiative. Type 2 diabetes mellitus and lung cancer are initial priority areas, with more to follow.

Conclusion

The NICE Conference 2026 gave valuable insights into the approaches that NICE and other healthcare bodies are undertaking in the move toward innovative HTA, preventive medicine, digital innovations, clearer guidance, and working evermore collaboratively.