Evidence - Support services
NHS Innovation Service
The NHS Innovation Service can put you in touch with organisations that can help you with your evidence generation such as NICE and NIHR. Find out more about the organisations involved and what sort of support they can provide.
NICE Scientific Advice Service
The NICE Scientific Advice Service provides a fee-based consultancy to help develop evidence that demonstrates the clinical and cost-effectiveness for all types of technology. They provide feedback on evidence generation plans, and help companies understand health technology assessment and the perspective of decision makers. They also provide a comprehensive peer review service for economic models that helps companies optimise the model’s structure, computation, coding, usability and transparency.
NICE MedTech Early Technical Assessment tool
The NICE MedTech Early Technical Assessment tool is a fee-based platform to help product developers understand what evidence they need to generate to convince healthcare commissioners of the value their technology can bring to the NHS.
NIHR Research Support Service and Clinical Research Network
The NIHR Research Support Service (RSS) and Clinical Research Network (CRN) provide support for funding applications, study design and study delivery of clinical research in applied health and social care. The RSS is a national service delivered collaboratively through eight hubs across England, each a partnership of research groups and organisations. The service provides free and confidential advice to develop funding applications within the remit of the NIHR, including clinical, applied health and social care research, and post-award advice to award holders. Find out more about the services offered by the RSS.
The CRN is made up of fifteen local clinical research networks which coordinate and support the delivery of health and care research in England. The CRN study support service can help you plan, set up, deliver and performance monitor clinical research studies. Find out more about the CRN study support service eligibility criteria and how to apply.
NHS Digital (now part of NHS England)
NHS Digital (now part of NHS England) are the statutory custodian for health and care data for England. For a fee they offer access to certain data sets through their Data Access Request service (DARS). The data may be provided in the Secure Data Environment or as an extract. For clinical trials you may also want to use the DigiTrials Service which can also provide access to this data.
The Developer Hub can help innovators learn how to build healthcare software and integrate with NHS APIs. It has resources including a step-by-step introduction on what their APIs can do and how your team can get connected, and an API catalogue.