Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to evaluate the potential impact of the Innovator Passport scheme on the average time taken for new health technologies to reach routine NHS use.

We are committed to ensuring that patients benefit from safe and effective innovations more quickly, that National Health Service organisations are supported to make informed, value-based decisions on medical technology, and that we put in place a low-friction procurement environment to support the medical technology (MedTech) industry, and in particular small and medium-sized enterprises in the United Kingdom.

To support this, we’re developing a digital product comparison platform called MedTech Compass. It will align with the new NHS Innovator Passport, making key information visible in one place, in order to avoid suppliers having to submit the same data to every NHS trust.

The current regulatory regime ensures that all medical devices placed in the market are safe, and MedTech Compass will only display products with Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approval.

The initial development phase of MedTech Compass, to test design concepts, will complete early next year and the findings of this phase will inform the specifics around how the system will operate.

An evaluation plan and metrics will be considered as part of the MedTech Compass development process, which may include measuring the time taken to adoption and other metrics informed by the initial development phase learnings.