Data Harmonisation and System Interoperability - Phase 3

Innovation pipeline data, plus outcome and impact data, is currently collected using different tools, stored differently, and has various definitions across partner organisations. This means that understanding the pipeline is complicated and needs to be improved.

The Innovation, Research, Life Sciences and Transformation Strategy (IRLSS) group has ambitions to improve its horizon scanning and demand signalling (HS & DS) capability and to align different and disparate data sources better to enable data-driven decision-making. We are aiming to align these different datasets with a view to creating an innovation repository. The repository would combine data from the Health Innovation organisations (HI's), the NHS Innovation Service and other sources (including awards, such as the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA)) to provide intelligence about innovations moving along the innovation pathway and their impact. For obvious reasons, we are not necessarily looking to create a single data source from the current disparate sources. Still, we need to align our datasets pragmatically to give a more coherent view of the market in a particular area, accessed more easily. The resulting data views will be used to support HS & DS, to identify technologies that do not offer additional benefits, and recognise where there are barriers to development and where there are issues with progress along the pipeline which could influence policy. This information will also support the NHS in understanding, prioritising, and preparing for incoming innovations.