NICE Technology Appraisals in the NHS in England - to September 2013, Experimental statistics, Innovation scorecard

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) technology appraisal process assesses the clinical and cost effectiveness of new and existing medicines and treatments, and provides guidance on their use by the NHS.

The Innovation Health and Wealth paper published by the Department of Health in December 2011, set out plans to support development and adoption of innovation in the NHS.  One of the actions in this paper is to drive compliance with technology appraisals by the publication of information relating to levels of compliance and variation at a local level. The Health and Social Care Information Centre was requested to develop and publish a scorecard on behalf of the Department of Health and the NHS Commissioning Board.

There is no central collection of data to directly support this, nor is data on the number of patients treated available centrally. Therefore this is an experimental publication, which presents available data from a range of sources and requests comments and suggestions from users to support future development of appropriate datasets.

The data is presented in the form of an interactive spread-sheet which uses macros to allow users to identify the organisations and interventions they wish to explore. The data is also presented in tables and charts to show variation. An accompanying report describes the data, the sources and its limitations. Please note that the interactive reporting spreadsheet should only be viewed in conjunction with this report, and the caveats to interpretation should be noted. This is supported by additional information in an FAQ format.

In this fourth publication, data is shown for April to September 2013 where data is available at the time of publication. Annual data from the recently published 'Use of NICE Appraised Medicines in the NHS in England, 2012' report has been included. 

In this publication the denominator for part 3 has changed from reporting medicine use by 'FCE bed days', to reporting by 'FCE days of hospital care' (bed days plus day cases). This is in response to feedback from users.

It is not appropriate to draw conclusions from comparison of the data in each scorecard publication. Additional medicines and additional hospitals trusts have been included in each publication. Many factors may be responsible for any apparent variation including differences in populations served, services provided and changes in clinical practice. In addition, where data has been standardised by resident population, data for six months in this publication cannot be compared to data for a whole year (available in previous publications).

NHS England have produced maps showing additional analysis of the data. Please see the link below. Note that some of the time periods and definitions used by NHS England differ to what is published here.