Neil Daly, CEO & founder of Skin Analytics, appeared before the UK Parliament’s Science Innovation and Technology Committee as part of the ongoing inquiry titled: “Innovation Showcase: Reviewing the UK Science and Tech Landscape.”
Neil’s participation was put forward by Kit Malthouse MP, who described Neil as “the innovator,” noting:
“I get people coming to see me, very often in my view, with miraculous innovations and technologies that will have enormous impact on our health… [Skin Analytics has a] remarkable approach to diagnostics on skin.”
Highlighting the urgency of early skin cancer detection
Before sharing evidence, Neil’s opening remarks underscored the very real skin cancer crisis in the UK:
“By the end of today, about six British citizens will die of melanoma.”
He went on to outline how Skin Analytics’ deployment could drastically reduce waitlists and improve early cancer detection, stating:
“Scaled across the UK, we could reduce waitlists over the next couple of years to 0 while finding more cancers in their earlier stages, saving the NHS about £35 million a year.”
The role of Government in enabling innovation – The Good
Access to researchers
Neil highlighted the UK’s access to top-tier AI researchers, noting:
“In AI, we have the benefit of some of the world’s best – and emerging – researchers… we’ve benefitted from access to both.”
“Having access to researchers is one of the things we do really well in the UK – and critical for deep technology businesses like ours. And especially within healthcare.”
Building clinical and health economic evidence
Neil emphasised that demonstrating accuracy in diagnostics is essential:
“In healthcare, being able to make the diagnostic decision accurately is the basic right to play in this field.”
Beyond that however, there is a need to prove that the technology provides health economic benefit to the system. Can we cut costs out of the system while getting better patient outcomes for the UK public?
He stressed the importance of showing health economic value alongside technical performance:
“We received support from SBRI Healthcare and the NHS to run a series of clinical studies and pilots… An independent evaluation found that DERM was at least as good as a dermatologist at finding skin cancer… for every £1 invested, we could return £2 to the UK healthcare system.”
The role of Government in enabling innovating – To Be Improved
Bridging the gap between research and scale
Despite being deployed in the NHS since 2020, seeing more than 170,000 patients and finding over 15,000 cancers plus a recent early use recommendation from NICE, Neil expressed concern about adoption speed:
“There have been 3 million patients during that time that we didn’t see.”
“Even with undoubtable benefits to patients and the system, we’re only in 20 NHS Trusts”.
Neil explored why he thinks this from his personal perspective:
“We’re not very good at having a conversation that is based on risk… implementing AI introduces risk: How will patients feel? What happens when it misses a cancer? Who’s liable?”
Neil called for reframing the dialogue.
At the end of 2024, there were 450,000 patients waiting to see a dermatologist; using NHS data, the Skin Analytics team were able to estimate that 3,000 high risk cancers were sitting in that patient population:
“We need to put the risk of not knowing those definitive answers against the risk that patients are facing every day… Delays will have a significant impact on whether these patients survive the disease or not… it becomes really clear that the risk of doing nothing is not acceptable.”
Final reflections: From scarcity to abundance
Neil concluded with a call for systemic change in how the UK approaches healthcare innovation:
“We have a healthcare system based on scarcity; there just aren’t enough clinicians… With AI, we can move from a health system built around scarcity to a system built around abundance.”
His key recommendation to the committee was the need for better translation of research into commercial success:
“We need to make sure we translate technology from research – which we’re very good and comfortable at doing in the UK – into commercial organisations that are able to grow fast enough to be able to support investment and return to those investments to really hit the scale that we need within our health service.”