NHS: Innovation

(asked on 6th January 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what plans he has to support the adoption of successful NHS test bed innovations more widely in the NHS; and whether additional funding will be made available for that purpose.


This question was answered on 11th January 2017

The Test Bed Programme is a joint initiative between the Department (including the Office for Life Sciences) and NHS England. It is creating industry-National Health Service partnerships to test combinations of innovations in technologies (including Internet of Things technologies) with innovations in how NHS services are delivered to improve health and care outcomes at the same or lower cost than existing practice.

There are seven test bed sites across England responding to locally identified clinical challenges. For example, patients with diabetes, in the West of England test bed site, are being equipped with remote monitoring and coaching technology to allow them to better self-manage their condition. All the test beds are now implementing their plans, with a focus on patient recruitment, deploying technological solutions, testing combinations and starting data collection for their evaluation phase. They are due to complete in March 2018 and information on the effectiveness of their combinatorial innovations will be published soon after.

Further details of the seven Test Bed sites can be found here:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/innovation/test-beds/

NHS England and the Department have put in place a package of support for the test beds including solving day-to-day operational issues as well as a programme of work exploring the system tools and levers that will be needed to support the wider adoption of successful innovations. For example, successful innovations may be funded the new innovation tariff developed by NHS England or through other national programmes.

Evaluation is central to the Test Bed programme. We want to understand the impact of the new combinations of innovations within each test bed, as well as the overall success of the programme. To this end, the test beds will undertake local evaluations of impact and value of the innovations for patients, the local health system and innovators. These local evaluations will be complemented by a national evaluation that will develop a framework that can be used to evaluate future innovations of this nature. It will build on the local evaluations by developing an approach which distils the outcomes and efficiency measurements from each Test Bed into a national framework.

The evaluations will be made available on completion of the programme.

Total test bed funding across the seven sites to date is approximately £4 million. Over the lifetime of the programme (two years), innovator partners would have contributed an estimated £18 million to the NHS.

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