Plans announced for a new funding model will allow digital health apps and devices to be made available free to patients
Medelinked NHS apps and devices
In his keynote speech to around 1,000 NHS leaders at the NHS Confederation Conference in Manchester on Friday, Simon Stevens head of NHS England, announced that for the first time the NHS will provide an explicit national reimbursement route for new medtech innovations.
Medelinked, a mobile health platform that encourages patient engagement and management, has already announced that its mobile health app for Android and iOS will be available free to NHS patients, doctors and healthcare professionals.
Around 20 devices a year - between them potentially benefiting millions of patients - will be authorised under the national scheme, which starts next year.
Medelinked says its platform enables individuals to create a health profile using data from such devices, enabling safe sharing of health records with their respective health providers.
Health records are displayed by the platform’s ‘Health Snapshot’, which can be displayed on a PC, Mac or any iOS or Android tablet or smartphone.
Data provided can include: blood glucose and cholesterol levels; calorie intake; weight; waist size; exercise levels and blood pressure as well as featuring contacts details and space for the patient to describe their symptoms and wellness.
Ina Gallifant, Medelinked CEO, said: “Combined with Medelinked, these new innovations to be prescribed by NHS health professionals can form a truly seamless, effective, efficient and coherent digital primary care pathway from initial diagnosis through to treatment benefitting both patients and professionals alike.”
Medelinked is available free to individual NHS patients, doctors and healthcare professionals here.
The new funding model is designed to accelerate uptake of new medtech devices and apps for patients with diabetes, heart conditions, asthma, sleep disorders, and other chronic health conditions, and many other areas such as infertility and pregnancy, obesity reduction and weight management, and common mental health disorders.
It may also “help cut the hassle” experienced by clinicians and innovators in getting uptake and spread across the NHS, according to NHS England.
This is because a new Innovation and Technology tariff category will remove the need for multiple local price negotiations, and instead guarantee automatic reimbursement when an approved innovation is used, while at the same time allowing NHS England to negotiate national ‘bulk buy’ price discounts on behalf of hospitals, GPs and patients.
Mr Stevens also announced a new round of recruitment to the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) programme, which supports developers with tried-and-tested innovations to spread them further and faster across the health service.
This follows a successful first year, which saw a rapid roll out of innovations to 68 NHS hospitals, benefitting over three million patients.
Stevens said:
“The NHS has a proud track record of world firsts in medical innovation – think hip replacements, IVF, vaccinations and organ transplants to name just a few.
“But then getting wide uptake has often been slow and frustrating.
“Now – at a time when the NHS is under pressure – rather than just running harder to stand still, it’s time to grab with both hands these practical new treatments and technologies.
“In the rest of our lives we’re seeing the difference that innovative tech makes, and now the NHS will have a streamlined way of getting ground-breaking and practical new technologies into the hands of patients and our frontline nurses, doctors and other staff. By doing that, we can transform people’s lives.”
Another innovation supported by the NIA programme, which could become routinely commissioned across the NHS, is MyCOPD, an app which allows patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) to self-manage their condition on their phone or tablet.
Additional supported innovations include AliveCor, a mobile heart monitor that instantly captures electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings, allowing the user to detect, monitor and manage heart arrhythmias, and PneuX – a cuffed ventilation tube and inflating device which is used to electronically monitor patients breathing in intensive care to prevent bacteria leaking into the lungs.