World-best innovations supporting Mental Health and early diagnosis and prevention of cancer join NHS Innovation Accelerator

The 13 innovations joining the NHS Innovation Accelerator were announced this week as part of an event to launch the fourth year of this award-winning national accelerator. An NHS England initiative delivered in partnership with England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), the NIA has supported the uptake and spread of 37 high impact, evidence-based innovations across more than 1,700 NHS sites since it launched in July 2015.

This year the successful innovations offer solutions supporting priority areas for England’s NHS: Mental Health, Primary Care and early diagnosis and prevention of cancer. There are several innovations already in use across the UCLPartners region in this year’s cohort including:

• MIRA Rehab: MIRA’s software turns physical and cognitive exercises into video games, making physiotherapy fun and convenient for patients recovering from surgery or injury. Find out more in this video from the #NHS70 Innovation series. This will be used in both Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.
• Skin Analytics: Intervention which enables dermatologist-quality screening in GP practices by using AI algorithms to identify skin cancer. The technology is used in The Royal Free and Barts.
• ChatHealth: Safe, secure messaging service that puts young people and parents directly in touch with healthcare professionals. Developed by Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, it supports greater efficiencies by enabling individual nurses to provide services to many more people.
• Population Genetic Testing: Model of care for testing populations to identify individuals at higher risk of breast and ovarian cancers because they carry the BRCA1/2 genes developed by Dr Ranjit Manchanda, Consultant Gynaecological Oncologist at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Trust.

Click here to find out more about this year’s NIA fellows.

Charlie Davie, Managing Director of UCLPartners said:

“The NHS Innovation Accelerator is continuing to deliver enormous value to patients and the public by providing support to world-class innovators. We’ve already seen great outcomes in patient safety and population health, and this year we look forward to supporting the NIA with 13 more exceptional fellows, so they can deliver these innovations at scale across England.”

Professor Stephen Powis, NHS Medical Director, 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 like the app which uses AI to help identify skin cancer, puts people in control of their care and enables them to get treatment as quickly as possible.”

Dr Séamus O’Neill, Chair of the AHSN Network, said:

“The NHS Innovation Accelerator is one of the flagship programmes of the AHSN Network. We are very proud of the impact it is having in supporting innovators across the NHS and social care. Many very promising NIA innovations have benefitted from visibility and evidence generation through the AHSNs. It is gratifying too that we are already seeing a number of the NIA innovations getting traction in terms of adoption and spread with patient and population benefit as a consequence.

“We look forward to working with the new NIA Fellows over the coming months to develop and deploy these life-saving innovations at scale across the country.”