U.K.'s NHS Incentivizes Digital Health Technology Use By Hospitals And Caregivers
The director of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has pledged to put more medtech devices and apps into the hands of patients in order to improve patient outcomes and reduce financial burdens on the nation’s health system. Among his proposals, Simon Stevens introduced a new “tariff” that would incentivize the incorporation of technology into treatment plans, starting in 2017.
The U.K’s Department of Health recently spent $6 billion in an effort to fully digitize the NHS, a move that British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt projected would save the health system $5.8 billion per year. In a recent speech, Hunt remarked that a quarter of British citizens with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, would be remotely monitored by their doctors by 2020, keeping them out of doctors’ offices and hospitals whenever possible.
To encourage innovation of new remote monitoring technologies, the NHS recently collaborated with several top-name health technology developers — a list that includes Verily, IBM, and Philips — to fund pilot programs, or “test beds,” that would “cut through the hype” of emerging health technology used to monitor senior care and a variety of conditions, including dementia and COPD.
Despite recent efforts, Stevens told a NHS Confederation conference in Manchester that the U.K. has been “penny-wise and pound foolish” by not embracing next-generation healthcare and products that would push the British healthcare system toward “self-care” and preventative medicine sooner, according to The Times.
“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,” said Stevens, adding that times will be tough for the NHS over the next five years amidst EU referendum uncertainty and recent healthcare spending reports.
Starting in 2017, Stevens proposed a program that would launch around 20 devices a year under a national fast-track program, which Stevens claims would benefit millions of patients and significantly cut costs, reported The Telegraph. By speeding the approval process and providing these devices for free, Stevens hopes to hasten their widespread adoption.
“Millions of devices of different types will be funded via this route,” said Stevens, according to The Guardian. “For people with diabetes or heart disease, or pregnant women or acutely ill in-patients, there’s a huge opportunity to improve the quality of care and also save money in other parts of the NHS by getting millions of new medtech devices into the hands of doctors, nurses, therapists.”
A new “tariff,” proposed by Stevens as part of his NHS payment system overhaul, would offer hospitals and caregivers financial incentive to increase their usage of innovative technology, such as the wearable heart monitor AliveCor and an app called MyCOPD, which monitors treatment adherence and provides advice to patients living with chronic lung disease.
Last year, Goldman Sachs released a report projecting that next-generation digital healthcare products and innovations could save the U.S. health system $300 billion per year, especially if tech developers focus on products that address chronic illness. Digital health products, according to the report, are proven to “improve patient outcomes, lower adverse events, and save lives.”