Health Enterprise East celebrates 15 years of medtech innovation
Anne Blackwood explains why the challenges facing the NHS offer opportunities for medtech innovators.
12 November 2019 marked the 15th anniversary of Health Enterprise East and therefore a natural time for reflection. In some respects, the world has changed significantly since 2004 – a time when Twitter didn’t even exist – yet the fundamental challenges facing the NHS are highly familiar.
While the NHS has certainly undergone some major structural reforms, these have yet to filter through to changes in the way patients experience care. The desired shifting of the burden of care to the primary and community sector has yet to manifest itself, and as a result people continue to flock to A&E, with waiting times in England reportedly reaching their worst level since the four-hour target was introduced. Has the NHS in fact done little more than rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?
In some ways the challenges of 2019 are arguably harder than they were when HEE was first established: there is no longer any slack or spare capacity in the system. Not only does the NHS have to continually do more with less, but an increasingly savvy public is demanding a greater role in management of its healthcare needs. There is a role and an opportunity for medtech innovators here.
Over the last 15 years, HEE has evaluated over 2,000 medtech ideas, so it’s clear to me that there is no lack of innovation and creativity. The true challenge remains adoption.
The good news is that the NHS is becoming more adept in this area and has been working to improve the medtech adoption ecosystem. In 2013, the introduction of the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) brought a focus on the adoption and spread of evidence-based innovation. Before then, it was simply no-one’s ‘job’ in the NHS to implement good ideas across the system. More recently, research and innovation has been put at the heart of the NHS Long Term Plan, which seeks to build a pipeline of proven innovations which meet the needs of patients and the NHS, as well as to improve uptake and spread of these innovations.
Crucially, the NHS has also begun to recognise the value of collaborating with industry. For example, the joint project between Moorfield Eye Hospital and Google’s DeepMind Health brings health technologists and clinicians together to co-develop a new approach to diagnosing eye disease. Another exciting venture is the 100,000 Genomes Project, a collaboration between NHS England, Genomics England, biotech company Illumina and 85 acute trusts. The aim is to work together to gain a better understanding of the triggers for rare diseases, a research effort which no commercial organisation or health body could successfully undertake on its own.
Nevertheless, SMEs continue to find it hard to get a foot in the door of the NHS, lacking the economies of scale that major corporates can provide. The NHS is trying to address these problems, and support for medtech SMEs is available via schemes such as the AHSN Innovation Exchanges and the SBRI Healthcare programme. However, adoption typically remains slower than many would like, hampered largely by regulatory, financial and cultural barriers within the NHS procurement process.
HEE’s aim for the next 15 years is to continue to champion those SME medtech innovators whose ideas have the potential to make a huge difference to patients but who need support to make it all the way. With 125 commercial licences and six newly-created companies under our belt, as well as around 40 projects currently in the pipeline, at HEE we feel optimistic about the future. Here’s to another 15 years!