NHS England wants to bring more commercial and procurement expertise to the NHS’s process of developing innovative medical products, according to a proposed strategy.
The strategy was outlined in a paper presented by Jacqui Rock, NHSE chief commercial officer, to the Accelerated Access Collaborative board in November.
NHSE wants to develop an “innovation pathway” by involving commercial and procurement directors in the process of identifying and adopting new clinical practice innovations.
It will bring the NHSE commercial and transformation directorates together with trust and health system procurement and commercial teams “to develop guidance and standardise approaches that will benefit both buyers and innovators”.
This wider visibility of new products created by the pipeline would mean “we will also have a better understanding of where NHS organisations are developing their own products,” the strategy paper said.
The paper also suggests implemeting the strategy would mean new ideas and products being developed by NHS organisations could be better commercialised and promoted to overseas markets through the UK Healthcare export agency.
“AAC partners will be able to use this to set standards and support NHS organisations to commercialise these. This will include developing a ‘best of’ list of products to export globally in partnership with Healthcare UK,” the strategy proposal added.
Ms Rock’s paper argues the AAC has done “significant work to increase the uptake of innovation” but “to date, little of this has focused on supporting or leveraging value from our commercial and procurement teams”.
The AAC is a partnership body set up to “streamline the adoptions of new innovations in healthcare”. It is made up of a wide variety of entities, including NHS organisations, regulators, government departments and agencies, royal colleges, patient groups and industry.
The new strategy will mean the commercial directorate and AAC “will work to better unlock the value contained in the innovation pipeline” which “will require an enhanced level of information sharing across the NHS and AAC partners”.
That “may raise questions of information governance and permissions”. However, most of these questions have already been answered through the work of the NHS Innovation Service and AAC partners.
Meanwhile, “work is under way to both expose the AHSN pipeline and develop a pipeline from Atamis [digital procurement system] to support this”.
The strategy proposal highlighted five “common problems” it seeks to address that had arisen from one-to-one interviews with 50 local commercial and procurement directors,
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Source: HSJ
Date: 10 January