Aims and objectives
- What sources of funding are available to primary care organisations.
- How to utilise NHS England and national programmes to secure funding for your organisation such as the Adoption fund and NHS digital partnership awards.
- Understand the benefits of adopting technology in a pilot phase.
Overview
Funding and investment can be the key to developing innovation and supporting implementation in the NHS. For external funding there are a few options that support primary care. Here we share a few funding opportunities. Your local AHSN can provide advice about the correct funding for your project.
Funding can depend on whether you may be searching for funding to commission an innovation or become an innovator within your organisation. Listed below are some key opportunities that have arisen where placing a joint bid with an innovation or technology provider may be able to provide funding to your organisation.
What is unified tech fund?
While strategy for digital transformation has remained consistent, a long history of attempts to fund the digitisation of the health and care system has resulted in a patchwork of funding strategies and opportunities. These can be confusing and difficult for you to engage with.
The NHS transformation directorate has tried to tackle this by bringing together several national technology funds available to NHS organisations.
Digital First
Digital First Primary Care is the name of a programme which supports the transformation of primary care by promoting the implementation, understanding and improvement of digital tools within general practice.
The tools can support patient access to appropriate and timely care, help practices better manage demand, and improve patient and staff experience.
The Digital First programme fund launched in 2019 is a five-year revenue stream with a focus on the use of digital and online tools to improve access to the core elements of primary care services. This will support:
- CCGs to embed and build on the digital transformation advances made in primary care as part of the pandemic response.
- all practices to deliver the core digital offer set out in the GP Contract and to increase use of digital tools by staff and patients, including through digital inclusion initiatives.
- all staff to work remotely.
- implementation in all PCNs and practices to streamline digital pathways to increase usability for patients, embed triage and support at-scale working.
- Digital First Accelerator projects that either test a new digital innovation or enable deployment of a tested solution in a new area or context, to solve performance or clinical priority issues. They must have the potential to be scalable across the system or regional footprint and to be sustainable over time.
SBRI Healthcare
Established to support the development of new innovations which meet known NHS challenges. This demand-led approach enables industry to respond directly to healthcare challenges and feeds the innovation pipeline with products that have an existing demand from the NHS. This allows for faster adoption and spread of these products benefitting patients. Find out more about SBRI Healthcare.
Digital Health Partnership Award
The Digital Health Partnership Award has been created to help NHS organisations in England to bid for funding to accelerate the adoption of digital health technologies to support patients with long-term conditions. NHS organisations are able to bid for funding to accelerate new and ready to scale digital health technologies.
Pilots are a great way to get to use a tool. Most providers in their early stages will need to provide real world validation of their digital tool. In this instance they will often provide their product and or services as little or no cost in order to gather market insight and research. This may be useful as you can also take the time to decide if the tool is appropriate and can deliver what is intended. There are of course important considerations such as time and project management costs and whether your organisation can accommodate the provider in terms of training staff and data sharing.
If you would like to find out more about what pilots or digital tools are available to test in real world validation settings, please contact the commercial team.
National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)
NIHR programmes funds:
- Commissioned and
- Research identified topic areas
NIHR has a range of different programmes, each of which fund different types of research covering public health and social care research. An example is Invention for Innovation (i4i).