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

Note: Additional data, unavailable at the time of the original publication (16 October 2013), were released on 13 December 2013, to update part 3.1 (purchase data by NHS hospital trust). All documents have been updated to reflect that this data is now available.

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.

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Please note that the interactive reporting spreadsheet should only be viewed in conjunction with this report, and the caveats to interpretation should be noted.

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This is supported by additional information in an FAQ format.

In this third publication, data is shown to June 2013. Additional information has been provided, including links to hospital trust formularies, and trend utilisation data for a number of NICE appraised medicines including those where adoption is supported by the NICE Implementation Collaborative.

It is not appropriate to draw conclusions from comparison of the data for 2011 in the first scorecard with that for 2012 in the second publication, nor with data up to June 2013 in this third 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 3 months in this publication cannot be compared to data for a whole year (available in previous publications).