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Scaling innovation faster for patient and population benefit

Laura Boyd, NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) programme manager at UCLPartners and Dr Amanda Begley, director of innovation and implementation, update NHE readers on progress with the programme.

It is often quoted that it can take an average of 17 years for a great idea to scale within the health service so that it is available for all patients and clinicians – a timeframe that is simply too slow given the scale of the need, the plethora of technological advances and opportunities coming on-stream every day. 

The NHS Innovation Accelerator aims to support delivery of the Five Year Forward View commitment to facilitate more rapid use of proven innovations for greater patient and staff benefit. 

Co-hosted by UCLPartners and the Health Foundation in partnership with NHS England, and in collaboration with the 15 academic health science networks (AHSNs) across the country, the NIA is focused on a breadth of healthcare entrepreneurs and their high-impact innovations. 

Using innovation to meet healthcare challenges 

The innovations have been selected to support in closing the ‘health and wellbeing’, and ‘care and quality’ gaps. They also provide opportunities to address some of the specific challenges set out in the 2016-17 planning guidance. For example: 

• Achieving a step change in self-care and patient activation, e.g. MyCOPD, an IT patient self-management and rehabilitation system for COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
• Implementation of a local digital road map, e.g. Patients Know Best (patient centred and controlled medical records) and Health Unlocked (a social network delivering needs assessment and care plans)
• A system at the forefront of research and innovation, e.g. Sapientia, a clinical-grade genome analysis and decision support tool improving rare disease diagnosis of a patient’s inherited condition
• Improving safety through reduction/ avoidance of harm, e.g. The Pneux (a device offering to eradicate ventilator-associated pneumonia); EPISCISSORS-60 (fixed-angle scissors reducing the risk of complications associated with episiotomies, pictured below); and Non-injectable arterial connector (a device that eradicates wrong-route drug administration, pictured above) 

Joining the NIA 

To join the NIA, all the applicants and innovations underwent a rigorous selection process involving review by patients, clinicians, national clinical directors, NHS England, the AHSNs, UKTI, Office for Life Sciences and NICE. Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, as chair of the NIA programme board, chaired the final selection panel which endorsed the appointment of the first cohort of NIA Fellows and their innovations. 

Sharing the learnings for wider national benefit 

Through work with NHS sites and NIA Fellows, we are capturing both individual and system-level learning as to what prevents and enables the use of high impact, proven innovations into practice. The insights will be collated and widely shared with potential adopters and also entrepreneurs to build capacity in the system for innovation use. 

Through the programme, work is also underway to understand and address systemic barriers to innovation use, such as, the time-lag between investment and financial return, incentives for innovation, the issues associated with using ‘cost avoidance’ in business cases. 

The NIA has already been able to share findings and case studies with the Accelerated Access Review as well as via the NIA programme board. 

The Health Foundation is now investing in an evaluation of the programme to assess its contribution to accelerating the adoption process, with interim findings to be shared in July 2016 and a final report ready towards the end of the year. 

Opportunities to get involved

There are a range of opportunities to participate in the NIA programme, including: 

• Expressing an interest in implementing any of the current 17 NIA innovations, including the opportunity to become a national exemplar site to act as leaders in the early use of innovations which transform the health and care of their populations
• Sharing your insights about the impact and successes you have experienced in implementing innovations locally, in order that others can learn from your work
• Submitting applications to the 2016-17 call, which is currently under design and likely to be launched in spring or early summer 2016

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