NICE will speed up patients’ access to the latest and most effective treatments, and dynamic guideline recommendations will be put in the hands of healthcare professionals more quickly, under plans unveiled by NICE in its 5-year strategy, launched today.
NICE will transform key elements of its approach to ensure efficiency and speed while maintaining robust and trusted methods.
The strategy aims to keep ahead of the challenges of a rapidly changing health and care landscape by forging key partnerships to expand the organisation’s skills, capacity and capabilities. It will renew and develop collaborations to support patient safety and track adoption of improvements.
Professor Gillian Leng CBE, NICE chief executive, said: “The new strategy sets out a vision for the future where NICE will be more dynamic, work more collaboratively, and continue to build on the excellent foundations of the last 22 years.
“We will help busy healthcare professionals to navigate these new changes and ensure patients have access to the best care and latest treatments.”
Ensuring the organisation is more proactive and engaged with the life science industry earlier in the innovation pathway will allow patients to access new treatments faster.
This new approach will also allow NICE to evolve from producing full guidelines to adopting a more modular, living style of recommendations, allowing rapid updates that incorporate the latest evidence to reach healthcare professionals faster than ever before.
Sharmila Nebhrajani OBE, NICE chairman said: “The healthcare of the future will look radically different from today – new therapies will combine pills with technologies, genomic medicine will make early disease detection a reality and AI and machine learning will bring digital health in disease prevention and self-care to the fore.
“Our new strategy will help us respond to these advances, finding new and more flexible ways to evaluate products and therapies for use in the NHS, ensuring that the most innovative and clinically effective treatments are available to patients at a price the taxpayer can afford.”
Professor Stephen Powis, NHS England medical director, said: “Since its creation, the NHS has always adapted quickly in response to new innovations, from world first transplants to more recently new cancer drugs and treatments during the pandemic, which are enabling patients to get the care they need from the comfort of their own home.”
