Healthcare Innovations R&D Support

Rewarding Healthcare Innovations with R&D Tax Credits

R&D in healthcare doesn’t end with pharmaceutical labs or equipment manufacturers; local GPs, hospitals and private healthcare facilities could be developing healthcare innovations and benefiting from HMRC’s R&D tax credit initiative.

R&D Support For Healthcare Innovations

Healthcare R&D focuses on improving the health and well-being of patients and the efficiency of our healthcare services.

It’s encouraged by the Public Health Agency’s HSC R&D Division, the Department of Health’s R&D Health and Social Care Strategy, which promises over £10 million annually, and as a key eHealth approach in their Health and Wellbeing 2026: Delivering together plan.

However, in 2000 the UK Government also introduced the R&D tax credit initiative to encourage and reward R&D within limited companies or PLCs. Today the initiative offers organisations an additional tax reduction of up to 26p (33p if you are surrendering a loss) for every qualifying pound spent on R&D.

Eligible Healthcare Innovations

If you tried to fill a healthcare service gap by attempting to develop new or modify existing products, services or processes, R&D tax credits may be available to your organisation. So long as your healthcare innovations tried to advance the scientific or technological knowledge within your field, and underwent a process of trial and error, you could receive valuable tax relief.

Below are some examples of qualifying healthcare innovations:

  • Bespoke software, to help improve internal operations
  • Mobile health apps for areas such as mental health
  • Wearables such as activity trackers
  • Pharmaceutical drug development
  • New medical devices and equipment
  • Prosthetic and biomechanical advances, most recently using 3D printing
  • Diagnostic software
  • Telehealth at-home monitoring devices used to treat long-term conditions such as heart disease
  • Artificial intelligence, which recently appeared in the form of virtual assistants

Qualifying R&D Healthcare Costs

There are five R&D cost categories in the initiative and they cover your healthcare innovations’ expenses from the start to the end of the investigative and development phase:

  1. People: Salaries, wages, employers NICs & pension contributions
  2. Subcontractors: Using third parties to help solve the technological uncertainty
  3. Consumables: Raw materials consumed in the prototyping and testing process (e.g. chemicals, flour, electronic components, etc.)
  4. Utilities: Heating, lighting and power
  5. Software: Software licences used to deliver your R&D project (e.g. AutoCAD; SolidWorks)

How To Claim?

Although you can complete an R&D tax credit claim on your own, the data analysis and case study requirements involved in the process can be complex. Therefore, to ensure you get the maximum benefit and a justifiable HMRC claim for your healthcare innovations it is best to seek specialist advice from a company such as Amplifi Solutions.

Explore our site to find out more about Research and Development Tax Credits, discover how much R&D tax relief you could receive and more about our service.

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