Volume 2

The use of new medical technologies within the NHS : fifth report of session 2004-05 / House of Commons, Health Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Health Committee.
Date:
2005
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The use of new medical technologies within the NHS : fifth report of session 2004-05 / House of Commons, Health Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    HARNESSING PROCUREMENT AS AN ENGINE FOR INNOVATION AND THE NEED FOR “FIRST ADOPTERS” 7. QinetiQ participated in the Health Industry Task Force, and strongly supports its recommendations. In particular, we commend its call for more support for innovation; across government there tends to be a lack of backing for the process of getting products and systems out of the laboratory and into the market place. There is no shortage of good science or ingenious inventions in this country, but there remains a chronic and urgent need to bridge this gap, and as it is bridged the NHS will be one of the principal beneficiaries. 8. There is much the DoH and the NHS can do to assist this process. Industry is reluctant to take on a new innovation without market pull, and in health the NHS is that market. The strongest possible engine for innovation is procurement, and procurement on the immense scale required for the NHS is not yet serving as that engine. For it to do so, more joined-up thinking and a greater awareness of strategic procurement and its potential in all sectors of the NHS—whether or not items are centrally procured—will be necessary. Without it, new technologies will too often fail to feed through to patient care. 9. QinetiQ’s experience throughout government procurement is that innovation is often stifled through the absence of a first adopter, and this is unquestionably so with health. There are many initiatives put forward to improve care delivery, but often no champion or owner of the problem (with a budget) at Department level to see it delivered. For example the London Heart Project has the backing of strategic health authorities, primary care, industry and many health professionals, yet is languishing due to a lack of committed funds to get it underway because no-one centrally will take ownership of it. 10. To give another example, QinetiQ, when still DERA, received £10.8 million from HM Treasury via the MoD for a number of innovative Health R&D projects packaged as “The Virtual Hospital”. This resulted in foetal ECG monitoring systems, a breast cancer grading system and 12 other projects. QinetiQ has since found it very difficult to get the NHS or industry to leverage the output of this research, despite several of the projects being rated as world-class by healthcare professionals. 11. In another instance, QinetiQ has, working with clinicians, proved the ability of simple decision support tools to dramatically reduce the time taken yet improve the accuracy of clinical decisions in intensive care. The potential for significant cash savings through the reduction in bed stay is very high. Despite this, this system has not been taken up because trusts either do not have the necessary IT infrastructure or do not recognise this as a priority. THE NEED FOR CENTRAL EVALUATION AND PUBLISHED STANDARDS 12. There is no centre of innovation, test and evaluation for healthcare products and processes in the UK. There is a dispersed body of expertise in some universities and NICE produces guidance in the areas of technology appraisal, clinical guidelines and interventional procedures, but the lack of such a centre to reinforce and inform NICE and cover those fields where its writ does not run is sorely felt. The NHS innovation hubs could go some way to close this gap, but no such intention has been indicated. 13. Spain and the US have developed centres where medical devices, new products and new approaches to healthcare delivery can be tested in a near to life simulated environment. Although a few NHS trusts (eg Queen Alexandra, Portsmouth) have developed training suites for surgeons and trauma care using manikins, uptake of use and effectively marketing the use of such a facility is limited. QinetiQ has experience of operating centres of this kind across the range of technology, such as its Centre for Human Sciences at Farnborough. 14. QinetiQ believes that such a centre in the UK in the field of healthcare would be highly beneficial, whether created from the network of NHS innovation hubs or separately. It would test the boundaries of new health technology, add value to training and simulation and test systems for their fitness for purpose, proper design, safety and applicability. This would assist the NHS, the UK health industry and patient safety by bringing through products and systems that would improve healthcare, and which the industry could sell profitably and to the right standard. It would also benefit the UK economy because better products could be exported. 15. The National Programme for Information Technology is underway to address the gross infrastructure and software needs of the NHS but, there are as yet no national standards for connectivity, qualification or accreditation of new' systems to be used within it. In Denmark, in contrast, published interoperability standards for information systems have allowed the country’s health IT industry to develop innovative products and retain competition and choice in the market place. THE SLOW ADOPTION OF TELEMEDICINE 16. Telemedicine—the delivery of care facilitated by communications technology—is not new, but modern multi-media technology facilitates its delivery on an unprecedented scale and in more ways than ever before. It is one of several aspects of eHealth that pull together different information technology applications across the spectrum of medical services, decision support systems and pervasive computing.