Innovating, which means creating new solutions to our current and future challenges, is essential if we are to meet the changing demands and complexities facing healthcare.
There are countless examples of innovation across the NHS that have transformed care for patients – but to be able to respond to the challenges we now face, innovation adoption needs to be quicker and more consistent across health and social care.
The recently published Innovation Ecosystem Programme (IEP), commissioned by NHS England, sets out a vision for the UK to lead the way globally in health gains and life sciences powered growth.
A population-based approach to innovation starts with the big challenges faced by our citizens, including rising health inequalities, chronic illness and slow economic growth. These complex areas need collaboration to galvanise an innovation ecosystem - including health, local government, third sector, community organisations and industry - around shared goals.
The IEP recognises the need for innovation to be core to NHS business, prompting changes in how innovation is designed, implemented, evaluated and shared.
Becoming innovation-ready
The pace of innovation is accelerating but often our ability to prioritise and adopt the best innovations lags while we are focused on delivering care day in and day out.
The Covid pandemic saw some of the fastest developments and adoptions in diagnostics, vaccines and treatments in living memory and we are witnessing the rapid growth of genomics, AI and digital automation.
As a health system, we need to be ready, both to generate and implement the right innovations at scale and pace. In our experience, this requires: collaboration across stakeholders including industry; a culture of innovation; clear methodology and processes; capacity to enable adoption; and effective evaluation of impact.
Collaboration
The IEP recognises a need for the health service to work more closely with the life sciences sector and other industries. Health service providers and life science organisations are tackling similar challenges around health outcomes, performance, productivity and inequality of access to treatments, albeit through different lenses.
Sharing insights and identifying opportunities for collaborative innovation can help align priorities and set direction that will allow us to achieve better value for patients more quickly. Industry partnerships can be complex, however, and it's important to put in place clear partnering and collaboration agreements, drawing on guidance set out in the NHS Confed guide to effective industry partnerships.
Collaboration also helps us innovate efficiently. Taking inspiration from successful schemes elsewhere in the UK or overseas, working in partnership with Health Innovation Networks and using established transformation methodologies developed by commissioning support units can all contribute to delivering the IEP's mission.
Culture
Cultural change is an essential enabler of innovation. How you stimulate and inspire your workforce to rise to new challenges, how you capture and work through ideas and how you build the capabilities to implement new initiatives will affect your ability to innovate.
The Darzi report highlights the need for better engagement with the workforce, patients and carers that can support problem solving and service improvements.
Making that work in practice is easier if you understand your starting point. Do your staff know what your main challenges are? What would they do with a good idea? Do staff and patients know how decisions are made or how to get things done? How is progress fed back and impact measured?
Assessing cultural attitudes provides the baseline on which to build, identifying strengths and gaps to enable you to develop a culture which supports and enables innovation.
Methodology
The lifecycle stages, which take innovations from concept through to impact measurement, each require different skills and processes. The ideas you're working on may be new but there are proven methodologies that provide the foundations on which to base your approach. For example, a robust value proposition at the outset will require you to consider all the elements including the problem to be solved, the workforce, technology, processes and skills you will need and the other support you will require at different points such as partnerships and project management.
In our experience it is beneficial to have a central hub for innovation that operates as an enterprise-wide capability hosted by a corporate function. This is not about making it one department's job to ‘do innovation' but about ensuring your organisation is building its own knowledge base and capabilities, and creating opportunities to challenge, refine and hone new ideas.
Adoption
Innovation is not only about supporting new ideas but also enabling full adoption and spread both within and outside your system. A central innovation hub can support the surveillance and horizon scanning for any proven process, technology or intervention to address key priorities. Identifying these top candidates will include assessing and predicting the benefits, costs and impact of widescale adoption. Boards can also receive assurance and oversight on the status of innovation adoption.
Evaluation
Evaluation is about demonstrating the idea is an investible proposition that can be scaled. Funding is linked to proof of value, so you need to work out as early as possible when you expect to be able to evaluate impact. Will it take one year or two years to see results? What evidence do you need to gather to demonstrate scalability? What impact do you expect to have on your organisation's priorities and those of the wider NHS? What contingency do you need to build in to account for the unexpected?
Demand for greater innovation is just one of several expectations facing the NHS. But it is not a standalone requirement. Innovation is a means to an end - it should facilitate other strategic priorities and be aligned with population needs. The IEP is not about innovation for its own sake, but about being impact-focused, delivering new ideas and ways of working which directly tackle the health and socioeconomic challenges we face.