Strategic academic partner of NECASIS — status: convening

National Institute of Safe Healthcare Autonomisation Research (NISHAR)

NISHAR is being established around one of the defining questions for the future of healthcare: how can we autonomise healthcare safely, intelligently, and at scale?

Healthcare autonomisation will not be built safely by technology alone. It will require clinical insight, academic rigour, regulatory clarity, implementation expertise, and real-world system building to move together. NISHAR is the academic and research arm of that effort.

The work sits across three arms, each essential to the others:

Government & regulatory

NHS England, the MHRA, NICE, DSIT, and other national bodies that will shape the policy, regulatory, safety, evidence, and adoption environment for healthcare autonomisation.

Academic

NISHAR — the research arm convening clinicians, researchers, academics, healthtech experts, and safety specialists around the science, evaluation, and implementation of safe healthcare autonomisation.

Commercial

NECASIS — the commercial arm, building the system itself and translating research insight, safety principles, and implementation learning into real-world technology.

NISHAR is where people approaching healthcare autonomisation from different angles can work through the same questions in the same room. It is where clinical AI, healthtech innovation, regulation, clinical safety, implementation science, and system design can meet around a shared purpose.

Its scope is deliberately broad. Healthcare autonomisation is not one technique; it is a stack — from clinical AI and machine learning, through systems engineering, clinical safety, medicines safety, human factors, workflow design, and implementation science, to the practical challenge of deploying this safely in real hospitals and clinics.

In its first phase, NISHAR will operate as a NECASIS-convened exploratory forum, hosting monthly or bimonthly online discussions with invited participants. These discussions are intended to surface the right questions early: what should be autonomised, what must remain human-led, what evidence is needed, what safety standards are missing, and how healthcare autonomisation can be developed in a way that earns clinical, regulatory, and public trust.

Over time, NISHAR will mature into a more formal research institute and contribute to the wider UK conversation on safe healthcare autonomisation.

Open call

If you are working on the safe autonomisation of healthcare from any of these angles, we would welcome an introduction.

Clinical & safety

Clinicians, pharmacists, implementation specialists, and patient safety leads — the people who deliver care and steward its safety in practice.

Technical & research

AI researchers, academics, and healthtech innovators — the people building the science of clinical AI and the tools that act on it.

Regulatory & policy

Regulators, NHS leaders, and policy and evidence experts — the people shaping the rules of the road and the conditions of adoption.

Expressions of interest can be sent through the contact page.

Participation & contributions

NISHAR is starting deliberately small and informal — an early network around general questions in safe healthcare autonomisation, with the intention of growing into something more structured as the conversations and the people sharpen.

The forum exists, openly, so that the thinking of clinicians, researchers, regulators, and operators can shape the direction of what NECASIS builds. We don’t want a platform designed in isolation from the people it’s meant to serve, and NISHAR is how we keep that honest. Conversations will inform NECASIS’s research direction, publications, product thinking, and commercial development.

Participants retain full ownership of their pre-existing intellectual property, unpublished research, and confidential materials. Please only share what you are happy to discuss in a non-confidential setting unless a separate written agreement is in place.

Where a contribution leads to a defined collaboration, publication, technical project, advisory role, grant application, or commercial relationship, the relevant terms will be agreed separately and fairly in writing.