Each year the UK government and healthcare charities spend over £2 billion on healthcare research. This level of investment has led to the development of many new and improved treatments, devices and diagnostic tools being developed. However, despite the potential of many of these developments to improve health outcomes and productivity the NHS often lags behind the rest of the developed world in terms of implementation.

The NHS Technology and Adoption Centre, or NTAC, was developed to address this issue. Established at the end of 2007, funded by the DH, NHS Institute and NHS South West, NTAC was commissioned to provide a more systematic approach to adoption. Essentially NTAC enables organisations to better understand and overcome their adoption barriers. Very often organisations try and fail to implement healthcare technologies and are unaware of the reasons for their difficulties. It also assists technology and diagnostics suppliers with navigation around the complexities of the NHS. Understanding and being able to negotiate your way through the technology adoption processes is vital to the success of any project. NTAC supports the sustainable implementation of innovative technologies and is focussed on providing organisations with the tools to not only implement healthcare technologies but ensure their continued and sustained use ensuring long-term patient benefit.

Such tools include economic modelling applications, which are relevant to and can be adapted to support individual organisations needs. As the NHS comes under increasing pressure to make financial savings, whilst improving patient outcomes, these tools become even more valuable. It could be said that the work of NTAC is absolutely vital in enabling the NHS to achieve the challenging cost savings objectives it has been set.

In summary 'more effective implementation of technologies able to deliver patient benefits have the potential to dramatically transform the NHS' and 'NTAC is the only organisation set up to accelerate and ensure effective adoption of such healthcare technologies'.

NTAC's original remit was to enable adoption of healthcare technologies which were under utilised within the NHS. The outcome of this work was the production of a How to Why to Guide™. These Guides provide comprehensive and relevant information for clinicians, managers, key decision makers and other stakeholders on how to implement specific technologies. These Guides provide NHS organisations with the key information they need to use to "adopt" these life-changing technologies in order to sustainably deliver improved outcomes.

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