The spend by our National Health Service (NHS) was £56bn in 2002/3 and is set to increase steeply to £90bn in 2007/8.

It has been proposed that about 1.5 per cent of this money should be allocated to research and development (R&D), although the £416m spent on research in 2002/3 falls far short of this recommendation. In other words, the NHS is operating rather like any other technology-based business and investing a proportion of its income into R&D so as to improve its products and services for the future.

But, and in common with most other UK businesses, this R&D investment is not at the level that might be judged to be necessary to maintain an internationally competitive position.

Nevertheless, investment in R&D, along with the renowned inventiveness of clinicians and other healthcare professionals, means that this vast organisation has the potential to spin out a wide range of products with commercial applications although it's probably fair to say that, in the past, this has not happened nearly as much as it might or should.

That's all set to change, as Richard Clark, CEO of Medipex, explained to me recently, and there is now a range of programmes to help in the commercial exploitation of NHS inventions.

Medipex (www.medipex.co.uk) is the NHS Innovation Centre for the Yorkshire and Humber region.

It is one of a national network of NHS Innovation centres that manage and exploit intellectual property with the NHS. Their job is to identify and then help commercialise opportunities of which, as Richard Clark emphasises, there are many. In talking to healthcare professionals he encourages them to see the potential commercial value of what they might already have done and to "dust off good ideas". Most of the ideas coming through Medipex so far have related to front-line equipment, with others arising from software for processing patient information as well as in diagnostics. In the 18 months since Medipex was set up it has already looked at more than 200 ideas and filed a dozen patents.

Typical of the sorts of idea presented to Medipex are a motorised lifting aid for drip stands - to avoid back strain from lifting heavy drip bags onto high drip stand arms; a touch screen electronic patient questionnaire for pre-consultation of women's health symptoms; and a novel solution for storing transplant organs.

But the one that caught my eye was a device that has been developed by the medical physics team at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and has been licensed to the Boroughbridge company Leeds Test Objects Ltd. (www.leedstestobjects.com). This invention goes under the somewhat daunting name of "panoramic test object", but it's actually a pretty important idea. It is sometimes necessary to take panoramic dental X-rays of patients to show the entire structure of the teeth and the face. You don't need to be a dental specialist to understand that it's important that the complex X-ray unit is set up with great precision if accurate X-ray pictures are to be obtained and the device licensed to Leeds Test Objects does this so that there is quick and easy quality assurance of dental panoramic X-ray units.

If this all sounds rather remote, just reflect on the complexity of much of the equipment now used in hospitals and doctors' surgeries and that it all needs to be performing accurately and to specification - day after day.

It's for this reason that organisations such as Medipex are so important in helping to bring benefits to the healthcare industry and, ultimately, to patients, by facilitating the commercialisation of the many good ideas that do flourish within this sector. Good luck to Richard Clark and his team!

Updated: 10:26 Wednesday, July 27, 2005