By Alison Tonge, Executive Director of Strategy, Planning and Innovation, NHS Arden & GEM CSU
Creating new solutions to 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 which have transformed care – but to be able to respond to the challenges we now face, we must adopt innovation more quickly and more consistently.
The 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. The IEP recognises the need for innovation to be core to NHS business, prompting changes in how innovation is designed, implemented, evaluated and shared.
Our pace of innovation is accelerating, too. The COVID-19 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.
But often our ability to prioritise and adopt the best innovations lags while we are focused on delivering care day in and day out.
As a health system, we need to both generate and implement the right innovations at scale and pace. In our experience, this requires four key elements:
1) Collaboration across stakeholders
The complex challenges facing our citizens - including rising health inequalities, chronic illness and slow economic growth - need collaboration to galvanise an innovation ecosystem including health, local government, third sector, community organisations and industry.
Health 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 which 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.
2) A culture of innovation
Cultural change is an essential enabler to innovation. How you 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 which 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 and plans are made? 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.
3) Clear methodology and capability
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 which 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, and the workforce, processes and technology you will need at different points.
In our experience it is beneficial for organisations to have a central hub for innovation hosted by a corporate function, building its own knowledge base and capabilities, and creating opportunities to challenge, refine and hone new ideas.
A central innovation hub can also support better adoption and spread both within and outside your organisation by keeping watch for proven processes, technology or interventions to address key priorities, while assessing and predicting the costs and benefits of widescale adoption. Boards can also receive assurance and oversight on the status of innovation adoption.
4) Effective evaluation
Evaluation is about demonstrating the idea is an investible proposition and 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 organisational or NHS priorities? What contingency do you need 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. It should facilitate other strategic priorities and be aligned with population needs. The IEP is about innovation that is impact-focused, delivering new ideas and ways of working which directly tackle the health and socioeconomic challenges we face.
The full version of this article was originally published in Healthcare Management.
Find out more about Arden & GEM's approach for building an innovation culture and capabilities.