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Recently I found myself in two very different rooms: Laing Buisson’s Out of Hospital Healthcare Conference and HETT (Health Excellence Through Technology).

Laing Buisson is a well-known health market intelligence organisation that convenes leaders from the independent and private healthcare sector, commissioners, insurers, investors and provider organisations. Conversations there tend to focus on contracts, investment, national footprint and insurer relationships.

At HETT, by contrast, the focus is digital transformation across the NHS. The language was digital maturity, AI-supported triage, interoperability and dashboards. One room spoke about capital; the other about code. Yet the direction of travel was strikingly similar: scale, standardisation and measurable productivity.

What struck me was not the difference between the two events, but the convergence in their thinking. Whether the conversation centred on investment models or digital architecture, the underlying assumptions about how healthcare should evolve were remarkably aligned. In both spaces the emphasis was on systems that could be replicated, measured and governed at scale.

Listening to these conversations, I kept returning to a simple question: where is the patient in this?