Real world validation
What is real world validation?
Real world validation of an innovation can bring benefits to both industry and health and care.
It can help with the adoption and spread of an innovation, providing potential adopting organisations with an understanding of the implementation pathway and assurance of benefit delivery. Alongside this, real world validation can support industry to generate investment and enhance a product’s sales story to enable growth and job creation.
Real world validation is an observed study to assess the impact and benefits to patients, staff and the health economy, in a non-controlled environment, of an innovation that has already undergone a pilot process.
All real world validation projects aim to capture:
- Complexities of the innovation implementation process
- Costs associated with the innovation implementation process
- Staff and patient uptake of the innovation
- Staff and patient satisfaction with the innovation
- Realisation of claimed benefits of the innovation
- Financial impact on the organisation, the NHS, and the wider health economy
- UCLPartners runs its real world validation process in partnership with the innovator and a health or social care organisation. All parties work together to deliver a real world validation report at the end of the process to answer the relevant points above.
The final real world validation report is then shared with the 15 Health Innovation Network organisations to promote the adoption and spread of the innovation in question.
The report is intended to add to the innovation story and serve as a guide to implementation for other organisations that may wish to adopt it.
Real world validation: benefits for industry
Commercial innovators beginning to sell their innovations into the NHS are generally found to have strong clinical evidence of efficacy and safety and some may have a high level financial Benefit Impact Model (BIM).
The NHS, however, often requires assurance on several issues including:
- The route to implementation
- The complexities to be overcome
- Evidence of benefits realisation similar organisations
- Anecdotal evidence from reference sites
These issues can prevent NHS organisations from adopting and spreading an early stage innovation.
The innovation report and case study produced by a real world validation can aid the adoption and spread of an innovation by providing:
- A study of the route through the implementation pathway
- An understanding of the complexities of the implementation
- Opportunities to further develop an innovation by observation of a deployment in a real world setting with all the associated pressures and complexities of a front line service
- Validation of the various benefits realised in that same complex environment
- A final report which can be disseminated around the AHSN network to aid in the spread of the innovation
- A final report which can serve as an assurance tool in lieu of a selection of reference sites for organisations to visit
Ultimately, a real world validation can generate investment and enhance a product’s sales story to enable growth and job creation.
Real world validation – benefits for the NHS and social care
Involving your organisation in a real world validation may seem to be adding an unnecessary burden of complexity to your project.
This is not necessarily the case.
UCLPartners offers a package of support to health and care organisations, proportional in scale to the size and complexity of the innovation, to support delivery of the real world validation. In return, health and care organisations are asked to generate and share data, and co-produce, together with UCLPartners and the innovation supplier, a final ‘real world validation’ report detailing:
- The complexities encountered in implementing the innovation
- The steps taken to overcome them
- The costs involved in the implementation
- The benefits derived from the implementation (fiscal, clinical and process)
This final report is then spread around the AHSN network with co-credits to UCLPartners, the relevant NHS organisation, and the innovation supplier.
The report is used to help in the adoption and spread of an innovation, providing other potential adopting organisations with an understanding of the implementation pathway and assurance of benefit delivery. Should the innovation not generate the benefits expected, the report can help the innovator to understand how best to refine their product.
For more information please contact: commercialteam@uclpartners.com.
Watch back this Health Innovation Network session at Giant Health 2021 for how the Networks can support you with your Real World Validation, led by UCLPartners and including four innovator case studies.