Prizes to build an NHS fit for the future
The government faces an NHS on the brink of collapse.
With those who can afford it accessing private care and those who cannot facing lengthy waiting lists and crumbling services, the question now is how can the NHS be redesigned and rebuilt?
To reduce the burden on an already overstretched system, prevention needs to be front and centre, ensuring people have the help and support they need long before they reach a crisis point.
Harnessing the power of data could highlight those at risk of disease and promote early intervention.
Implementing holistic community-based programmes could support those with complex needs to find treatment in the community.
And empowering the individual to manage their health with supportive technology could promote appropriate care.
I have some ideas for how challenge prizes could deliver some of the innovation the NHS sorely needs – starting with a prize that could support effective management of chronic conditions in the community.
Chronic Pain Management Prize
It is estimated that between a third to a half of people in the UK may be living with chronic pain. It’s the second most common reason for absence at work and has huge impacts on the economy.
Innovation is desperately needed to provide alternatives to opioid pain management. New research is utilising advanced biofeedback tools to monitor pain flares in patients with musculoskeletal pain. By providing data that can predict pain flares, individuals can amend their lifestyle to better manage their pain.
So I’m proposing a prize that rewards tools built on this groundbreaking research, partnering pain researchers with technologists to develop wearables that can monitor and predict pain flares.
I’d award £5m to the best wearable tech for pain management. The solutions could be varied, but they would be judged against fair, open criteria: how effective they are at pain management, how well designed they are for their users’ needs, and whether they abide by data interoperability standards.
This would work well as a prize because it’s possible to reward teams for clear success against these well-defined outcomes. But also because fresh thinking is needed in the space, and prizes often give the breathing space for unusual approaches, broad collaborations or previously unproven innovators to thrive.
Hospital at Home Prize
In considering innovation for prevention, we should also consider the other end of a patient’s journey, discharge. Interventions here are as important as interventions before accessing care.
Once in the system, it can be hard to get out. With community services unable to provide long term care, patients remain in hospital for lengthy stays, further increasing the pressure on the system.
To fix this, we need to increase access to community services, boost numbers of trained staff in the community – and we also need to develop new, cutting-edge technologies in support of at home and community based long term care.
I’d like to offer a Hospital at Home Prize to drive creation of some of this technology.
My grandmother is 96 and after a recent hospital stay, although medically fit for discharge, had ongoing care needs. Thankfully she is now back at home – but she had to wait five months for a care package to be put in place before that became possible.
I wish we had been able to use technology to support her safe discharge from hospital – knowing we could monitor her safely from the comfort of her own home.
Since the pandemic, more emphasis has been placed on the effectiveness of so-called “virtual wards”, delivering hospital level care at home. Supporting at-home care with cutting edge non-invasive monitoring technologies could increase safety and reduce staffing needs.
So for this prize, I would offer £3m to the best team to design and test technology that supports NHS virtual wards. I’d want to use the Prize as a test bed for the finalist solutions – and to offer the winning team a contract with an NHS provider.
The winner would be chosen based on effectiveness in monitoring patient metrics, effective implementation strategy with a care pathway, and ease of use.
Why offer this as a prize? There are solutions out there, but they are not being used effectively in combination, and there’s a need for greater testing in-situ. A challenge prize, with rigorous testing, would be a great way to bring together these innovations and generate robust evidence.
And by offering an NHS contract – an advance market commitment – as part of the final prize, we could create a path to procurement and wider adoption, so often a difficult problem with bringing innovation into huge public sector organisations.
Reach out
Do you think prizes could unlock progress in the NHS? Do you think these are the right ideas? We’d love to talk about it.
