NICE Technology Appraisals in the NHS in England - to June 2015, Experimental statistics, Innovation scorecard

The objective of the Innovation Scorecard is to support appropriate access to NICE approved products (medicines, devices and diagnostics), by giving health and care commissioners and professionals information they can use to identify and act on unwarranted variation in patient access to these treatments.

The Scorecard does this by transparently providing access to data, which can be used alongside a range of other data sources (including patient population outcomes) to measure progress in access to NICE approved products within local areas or at a national level. It is not intended to be used for performance management.

The Innovation Health and Wealth Strategy set out plans to support development and adoption of innovation in the NHS. 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.

There is no central collection of data which can directly support the assessment of uptake of NICE recommendations, nor is data on the number of patients treated available.

Therefore this is an experimental publication, which makes use of data currently available from a range of sources, both from the NHS and the commercial sector.

New for January 2016:

- Introduction of groups of medicines that are options for treatment of certain conditions. These four groups are: Alzheimer's disease; Novel Oral Anti-coagulant (NOAC) use split by primary and secondary care conditions; and Osteoporosis. The 13 medicines involved in the groups have been removed from the individual medicine spreadsheet and are presented in a new spreadsheet.

- Actual Daily Doses (ADD), a new prescribing measure, has been developed where current prescribing measures are not appropriate or representative of prescribing in England.

 - 13 NHS England Regions were established from 1 April 2015 to replace the previous 27 Area Teams. In this publication, data for the latest quarter 2015/16 Q1 is available by NHS England Region. The previous 7 quarters of data have been mapped from Area Teams to the new NHS England Regions to provide a consistent time series.

 - Two new estimates have been developed for this publication: medicines to treat metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and medicines to treat relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. These new estimates include ranges as recommended by the Government Statistical Service (GSS) Methodological Committee.

The HSCIC requests comments from users on the changes introduced to this publication. Please send feedback to [email protected] or call 0300 303 5678

Further Information:

In this publication the individual medicines, grouped medicines and medical technologies are presented in separate interactive spreadsheets. These spreadsheets use macros to allow users to identify the organisations, interventions and time periods they wish to explore. The data is also presented in tables, charts and maps to identify trends and variation.

An accompanying report describes the data, the sources and its limitations. Please note that the interactive spreadsheets should be viewed in conjunction with the report, and the caveats to interpretation should be noted.

In addition, an estimates report looks at the use of a range of appraised medicines in relation to the number of eligible patients as estimated by NICE. Additional information is available in an FAQ format.

Due to the experimental status of the publication and the provisional nature of some of the data from operational processes, some figures may be revised from publication to publication as issues are uncovered and resolved. The experimental status allows for this to occur if it is determined that a refresh of data is required subsequent to initial release. Where a refresh of data occurs, it will be clearly documented in the publications. Users should always use the figures in the latest publication to ensure they are the most up to date figures available.

Note that due to the size of the spreadsheets, they may take a few moments to open. NHS England has released additional maps. See the link provided below.

Please note as of 23rd March 2016 the groupings spreadsheet and corresponding csv file have been removed due to data quality issues in the file. Users are advised not to use these files. A corrected version will be published on 12th April 2016 as part of the April Innovation Scorecard publication.