PEP has been announced as one of 11 innovations selected to join the award-winning NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) in 2020.
At a launch event chaired by Professor Stephen Powis, National Medical Director for NHS England and NHS Improvement, the 2020 cohort of Fellows presented their innovations to key stakeholders, including Tony Young, National Clinical Lead for Innovation of NHS England and NHS Improvement, and Nigel Edwards, Chief Executive of the Nuffield Trust, both of whom also spoke at the event.
The innovations joining the NIA this year offer solutions supporting priority areas for England’s NHS as laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan. Their recruitment follows an international call and rigorous selection process, including review by over 100 clinical, patient and commercial assessors, an informal review by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), interviews, and due diligence.
The Patient Experience Platform (PEP) provides real-time feedback about what patients are experiencing across the UK and beyond. Uniquely, PEP automatically collects publicly-available data from a variety of social media & online platforms then processes the data through PEP’s algorithms to identify what is relevant, categorises it and scores the sentiment. The data, too plentiful to be economically reviewed manually, is presented in an interactive dashboard allowing users to gather actionable insights for hospitals, commissioners and regulators. Users can quickly identify and rectify areas of concern, and recognise and reward excellence.
The announcement marks the fifth year of the NIA, which is an NHS England initiative delivered in partnership with England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), hosted at UCLPartners. Since 2015, it has supported the uptake and spread of 62 evidence-based innovations across more than 2,210 NHS sites.
Professor Stephen Powis, National Medical Director for NHS England and NHS Improvement, said:
The NHS Long Term Plan puts the latest technology and innovation at the heart of people’s care and the future of our health service.
Right across the NHS patients are benefitting from world-beating innovations, spread as part of this programme, and now even more patients will be supported by new tools.
Piers Ricketts, Chair of the AHSN Network, said:
The NHS Innovation Accelerator is one of the flagship programmes of the AHSN Network. NIA Fellows have made a huge contribution to our health and care system since we started the programme five years ago, and we are proud to have supported these remarkable individuals on their development journey. It is gratifying to see their high-impact innovations gaining traction and visibility through our accelerator programme, and we are delighted that several NIA innovations have now had national impact in the NHS.
We look forward to working with the new NIA Fellows to help them scale and deploy their innovations across the country for the benefit of patients and the NHS.
Dr Mark Lomax, CEO of PEP Health, said:
We’re delighted to have been chosen from a large and excellent field of applicants - it is a testament both to the power of PEP and the importance our health service is rightly placing on patient experience. Better data is essential to improve health services and we look forward to scaling PEP in conjunction with our NHS Partners and the patients they serve.
About the NHS Innovation Accelerator
The NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) is an award-winning NHS England initiative delivered in partnership with England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), hosted at UCLPartners. It supports delivery of the NHS Long Term Plan priorities by accelerating uptake of high impact innovations for patient, population and NHS staff benefit, and providing practical insights on spread to inform national strategy.
Since it launched in July 2015, the NIA has supported 60 Fellows representing 62 innovations. Over 2,210 additional NHS sites are now using NIA innovations, £134.8m external funding has been raised, 468 jobs created, 113 awards won, and 45 NIA innovations are selling internationally.
For more information about the NIA, visit www.nhsaccelerator.com.