NICE Technology Appraisals in the NHS in England - to December 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.

An action in this paper is to drive compliance with technology appraisals by the publication of information by the Health and Social Care Information Centre relating to compliance and showing variation at a local level.

There is no central collection of data which can directly support this, nor are data on the number of patients treated available. This is therefore an experimental publication, which makes use of data currently available from a range of sources. The HSCIC and NHS England request comments and suggestions from users to support future development of appropriate datasets and reporting.

The data are 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 are 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 spreadsheet should  be viewed in conjunction with this report, and the caveats to interpretation should be noted. Additional information is available in an FAQ format.

There are a series of publications since January 2013, each includes developments and additional technologies. In this fifth publication, data are shown for April to December 2013 where data are available at the time of publication.

Developments in this publication include:

- Revision of Part 2.1 to include more medicines used predominantly in primary care

- Update of Part 3.2 to include additional medicines used predominantly in secondary care

- Development of Part 5 to include reporting at Area Team level

- Methodological change in Part 5 to report data from prescriptions written in hospitals but dispensed in the community within the secondary care data. This is a change from the last publication, where these data were included with the primary care data.

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