Data Harmonisation and System Interoperability Phase 5

Innovation in digital technologies, greater use of data and technology-enabled transformation are ways to support the NHS in addressing the pressures it is currently facing. Many innovative solutions are coming onto the market all the time, all in different states of market readiness. In recent years, through the creation of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, the AI funding awards and other initiatives, including most recently the intention to re-licence the HINs, the NHS has developed the infrastructure needed to enable the NHS to adopt innovation more widely. However, this is a complex landscape, and we currently need a means of tracking innovations as they move along the innovation pathway, from demand signalling and horizon scanning to ideation and development, approval, adoption and spread. This means the NHS has an incomplete view of the innovations available to support a particular need and is frequently unsighted on the timescales within which innovations are likely to come to market.

Aims

Innovation pipeline data, plus outcome and impact data, is currently collected using different tools, stored differently, and has various definitions across partner organisations. This means that understanding the pipeline is complicated and needs to be improved.

The Innovation, Research, Life Sciences and Transformation Strategy (IRLSS) group has ambitions to improve its horizon scanning, and market intelligence capability and to align different and disparate data sources better to enable data-driven decision-making. We aim to align these different datasets to create a combined view of selected data items. This new dataset would combine data from the Health Innovation Networks (HINs), the NHS Innovation Service, and other sources (including awards, such as the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA)), to provide information about innovations moving along the innovation pathway and their impact. For obvious reasons, we are not necessarily looking to create a single comprehensive data source from the current disparate sources. Still, we need to align our datasets pragmatically to give a more coherent view of the market in a particular area that can be easily accessed. The resulting data will be used to support horizon scanning and market intelligence, to identify technologies that offer additional benefits, and to recognise where there are barriers to development and where there are issues with progress along the pipeline which could influence policy. This information will help the NHS understand, prioritise, and prepare for incoming innovations.