The NIIN Health Alliance is a learning system. As it reviews its experience in generating impact in the last year, national patterns emerge – offering a view of the current landscape and informing strategic direction for the future.

Between 2024 and 2025, global health technology research reached a tipping point: one year’s output (9,448 articles), exceeded the total for the previous four years combined.

While the most prominent topics identified in the research mirror the areas in which the NIIN Health Alliance has been working – artificial intelligence, digital health, infrastructure & interoperability, workforce capacity building, and digital delivery platforms – the sheer volume of information demonstrates that near impossibility of learning by digesting this vast array of publications.

The NIIN takes a different approach to learning: one that prioritises action and engagement. The Alliance’s work reveals how collaboration is a powerful driver of innovation across the health sector.

Case studies show that when universities, health services, and industry partners co-design and prototype solutions, technology development and adoption can accelerate.  At the same time, engagement across the Alliance and its broader network highlight the importance of trust and validation in adoption of emerging technologies.

We see that meaningful progress in the health sector happens when technologies are thoughtfully prototyped and rigorously tested – building confidence and surfacing challenges early. Yet persistent barriers remain: legacy infrastructure, uneven workforce readiness, and fragile funding models consistently constrain progress.

These challenges are not isolated but shared across the system. Addressing them requires coordinated investment, collaborative effort and bold leadership.

Specifically, this is not just about deploying new technologies this is about reimagining how care is delivered, how workforce is empowered, and how infrastructure can support a more connected, intelligent, and equitable health system.

NIIN Health Alliance 2025 HealthTech Pulse Survey

In 2025, the NIIN Health Alliance and its key partners were engaged through a new HealthTech Pulse Survey*, designed to understand areas of focus, trends, considerations and barriers faced in impactful innovation and technology deployment.

The survey results paint a valuable and broad picture of which technologies are gaining traction in the health system – and which ones are still on the wish list, waiting to be adopted. The survey also highlights systemic challenges across the health sector – shared challenges that are complex but solvable through collective effort.

A multi-year approach

The Health x Digital Transformation report series is a multi-year, practice-driven approach to health innovation, curated by the NIIN Health Alliance. The 2024-25 report presents provocative analysis and highlights urgent “Transformation Dimensions” crucial for health systems, policy-makers, and tech firms. Each dimension details its significance, successful examples, and actionable steps for 2024-25. The report, part of a three-year annual review, aims to build a sustained innovation pipeline, encouraging collaboration and long-term progress in the health sector.

How we did it

The ever-growing expanse of literature on health technology is vast, complex and hard to synthesise in timeframes that can support rapid discernment of opportunities for action or implementation.  We have arrived at this view by looking at as much of it as we can. ​Specifically, we reviewed 9,367 academic articles on the PubMed database between 2020-2024, and then used natural language processing to extract prominent keywords, giving a strong sense of trends across the research.