Whose job is innovation anyway?

Last week, health secretary Matt Hancock launched the much-anticipated £140 million AI award, aimed at fast-tracking game-changing innovation to the NHS. The award forms part of the £250 million AI Lab announced last year, thanks to which, for another four weeks, companies will be able to bid for funding to launch AI innovations that have the potential to save lives or alleviate staff pressures.

Of course, any additional funding to help unlock innovation in the NHS is always welcome, but it’s obvious to me (and many others) that there’s a bigger issue at hand. As Hancock rightly pointed out in his speech, despite funding, too many good ideas never make it past the pilot stage. And for those that do, it takes on average 17 years for new research evidence to reach mainstream adoption. Clearly this needs to change – but how?

While the NHS has been working to improve the medtech adoption ecosystem, with the introduction of AHSNs a few years ago and strategies such as the ‘Well Led’ inspection framework, the fact remains it is simply no one’s job to enable and implement innovation. We’ve seen this first hand through our work with clinicians. Many go well above their own job description to explore enhanced ways of working and create new devices that could improve patient outcomes. But that’s just it: at the moment, driving innovation requires a constant balancing act between delivering one’s actual day job, and a high-pressured one at that, and striving to find extra time (where from exactly?) to make improvements.

The Association of British HealthTech Industries has recently launched a campaign to address this very problem, calling on every NHS organisation to appoint a dedicated Chief Innovation Officer. The individual in this role would be solely focused on delivering efficiencies and, crucially, the adoption of innovation. It was pleasing to hear Hancock echo these calls, saying that he wants to see a digital and technology leader on every board, as well as pushing ahead with the ‘Digital Ready Workforce Programme’ and appointing a new permanent Chief Technology Officer of the NHSX.

Developments like these offer real hope that innovation within the NHS can become a genuine priority, and more critically, lead to deliverable solutions. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t take 17 years to see the difference on the ground.

#AI #NHSX #Innovation #ItsNobodysJob