CEIS Solutions: making good ideas work in the real world

Their first contract is the three-year BRIDGE programme, which involves working with the NHS as it prepares to roll out powerful new weight-loss drugs across England.

This is an ambitious plan that could bring huge patient benefits, improve treatment access and reduce health inequalities through the introduction of a new obesity pathway across Birmingham Solihull and the Black Country.

As the independent evaluation partners, CEIS Solutions are evaluating the introduction of this new pathway and exploring whether it is beneficial for patients, the health system and the workforce. The evaluation will also explore whether the new system is economically viable and how the lessons from its introduction could be used to support other obesity and integrated care board led programmes.

As Professor Grove puts it, Implementation Science is about ensuring that scientific discoveries are “taken up into practice, and actually make a change to the real world. It’s a systematic way of doing that.” Too often, she notes, publicly funded research “sits on a shelf and no one uses it – what’s the point?” Both she and Dr Scantlebury are motivated by the idea of not letting those ideas and investment go to waste.

CEIS Solutions grew out of the Centre for Evidence and Implementation Science, established at the University of Birmingham in 2025. The research institute quickly found itself deluged with requests to help health systems, public bodies and companies successfully introduce and scale up new technologies and innovations.

As Professor Grove observes, the recurring pattern when innovations fail is that “nobody actually looks at the context in which they’re trying to implement something.”

A typical scenario involves a team announcing, “'I’ve got a new medical device that’s going to revolutionise orthopaedic surgery.’ No one will have gone to a hospital, spoken to a surgeon, spoken to a patient, spoken to somebody in the finance team.”

By contrast, CEIS starts with the context and fits new technologies into that. They are deliberately agnostic when it comes to methodology. “How we get there might be qualitative, might be health economics, might be statistics, might be data science. It’s our job to do that diagnostic analysis of the problem using a range of methods and then develop the solution,” says Professor Grove. This methodologically flexibility is what allows the team to be able to pivot and respond to any implementation challenge, regardless of the context.

The team offers evaluations and advisory work, but also invests heavily in training through the Implementation Science Programme led by Dr Scantlebury. CEIS Solutions run an Annual Conference and Winter School teaching mid‑ to senior‑level professionals implementation science through two days of practical problem solving. A new Summer School will be launched in 2027 and the team are increasingly delivering bespoke training programmes to organisations across the public sector and industry.

The Operating Division model has provided an essential underpinning for this commercial growth, offering a low-risk way to test out the viability of the business model.

“It allows you to test the water and the viability of it before making that big leap,” says Dr Scantlebury. “Before we completely spin out and commit to being a business in a separate entity, we can create a microcosm version of that.”

The University has also helped CEIS Solutions move at commercial pace with legal and commercial requirements such as when clients request “an NDA by tomorrow”.

The set-up has allowed both founders to retain their academic roles with the University, a big draw for customers. Private‑sector clients, notes Professor Grove, “love the credibility of having a couple of academics who are located in a leading university”.

A year in, CEIS Solutions has already moved from small public‑sector contracts into six-figure deals, with most clients coming via in-bound requests. The founders next milestone is clear: “our target is our first million pound contract.” That may not be a remote prospect, given the increasing recognition from organisations that good ideas aren’t enough. It’s how they are put into practice that matters.