Meet the Support Organisation: Health Innovation Network

The NHS Innovation Service brings together 12 world-class expert support organisations, working in partnership to help innovators navigate the health and care system, speeding up access to support.

In our Meet the Support Organisation series, we’ll meet the people and teams who are part of the service, helping to turn great ideas into real-world impact.

Each profile introduces one of our partner organisations - exploring who they are, how they support innovation, and their advice for anyone looking to make a difference through the NHS.

2. What is your organisation’s role in supporting health innovation? What specific expertise do you individually bring to the NHS Innovation Service?

As a Network we transform lives through innovation by supporting health and social care teams to find, test and implement new solutions at scale to the NHS’ greatest challenges, driving economic growth.

This means providing boots-on-the-ground support to local health and care teams to deliver health innovation, and support innovators from idea right through to widescale implementation, bringing together clinical, academic, research and commercial expertise.

Any innovator who registers with the service might be referred to one, or more, of the local health innovation networks. I became involved with the service because the Health Innovation Network also runs the Needs Assessment Service. Everyone who registers with the NHS Innovation Service completes an innovation record, which captures all the information about your innovation and what help you are seeking. I’m proud this service is led by Health Innovation Wessex in collaboration with our colleagues at Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria.

Once an innovator has registered with the service and completed their record, our innovation experts will assess it within 10 working days, and offer bespoke, tailored advice, referring you to the right organisations who can support your journey further.

For us, the service has meant that through the NAS we can deliver a bespoke and expert analysis of the needs of each innovator who comes to the Innovation Service, and use our extensive partner networks to refer them to organisations who can progress their innovation journey.

3. How does Health Innovation Wessex help innovators to navigate the NHS and bring their ideas to life?

The 15 health innovation networks operate in their own geographies, embedded in their communities and health and research ecosystems. This makes us unique because we hold insights into local systems, and can support with building local relationships. We’re also connected to academia, and have lots of industry expertise in our commercial teams to give innovators bespoke advice.

If you’re at the beginning of your innovation journey, we can give you guidance on any gaps in your value proposition or evidence base, and help you to create a proof-of-concept prototype. We’re here to offer advice on the complexities of the health and care sector, and guide you on how your innovations can best weave in to improve them.

For more advanced innovations, the networks can help with developing your value proposition, impact modelling, health economics and brokering connections with health and care experts to support with real-world evaluation, funding opportunities and implementation.

The networks also partner with all types of industry – from small enterprises to global pharmaceutical and life science and technology companies, who might be seeking to partner with the NHS to bring innovative treatments or pathways to patients.

4. Can you share an example of a successful innovation you’ve supported via the NHS Innovation Service?

As a Network, we’re proud to have supported more than 1,300 innovations via the NHS Innovation Service to date. One example is Daye, who have developed the Diagnostic Tampon for HPV screening - an at-home test that integrates cervical cancer screening into a familiar patient routine, improving early detection rates and reducing the burden on NHS cervical screening services. Daye were referred to Health Innovation Wessex, and we supported them by facilitating valuable discussions with sexual health staff, primary care clinicians and screening managers to better understand the pathways, governance and evidence requirements for screening programmes.

We also partnered with Daye as external evaluation partners on grant bids, and supported their successful applications to the NHS Innovation Accelerator and the Accelerating FemTech Programme. Find out more about Daye in this interview.

5. What’s your one piece of advice for innovators looking to work with the NHS?

Our seven conditions for successful innovation adoption bring together the key elements we’ve seen come together when innovation has been successful. Think pathway not product is a crucial one – take time to think about the whole clinical pathway your innovation will support, making sure you explore what this looks like for staff, organisations and patients. Find out more about our Seven Conditions for Successful Innovation on the Health Innovation Network website.

If you’d like to know more about how Health Innovation Wessex can support you from idea to implementation, visit the NHS Innovation Service webpage.

To start your innovation record today click here.