23/01/2012

NTAC CEO SPEAKS AT INDUSTRY CONFERENCE IN VIENNA ABOUT
ADOPTING INNOVATION IN THE NHS


Today (Friday 20th January) Sally Chisholm, Chief Executive of the NHS Technology Adoption Centre (NTAC), spoke at the Third Annual ‘Overcoming Regulatory and Commercialisation Challenges for Personalised Medicines’ conference in Vienna.

The event was attended by CEOs, Vice Presidents, Directors and Senior Managers of Pharma, Biotech and Diagnostic Companies from across the world as well as other stakeholders including Ministries of Health, Healthcare providers and Regulatory agencies focussed on Personalised Medicines.

Sally was invited to speak to the audience at the event about the critical issues involved with adopting innovation in the NHS. Sally discussed how the NHS is perceived to be slow to adopt technology in comparison with health care systems in other developed countries but that in fact, technology adoption is also relatively slow across all health care systems.

Sally also spoke about the role the NHS Technology Adoption Centre has in ensuring that new proven technologies are being implemented across the NHS and how the critical issues involved in the adoption process include:

o Ensuring innovation has been thoroughly assessed by all the people who would be involved in it – grass roots through to senior management

o Decommissioning of previous system is undertaken

o Re-skilling – people taught new skills or different type of person is employed

o Adjusting tariffs

The speech sparked some positive debate with the attendees recognising how important it is that patients, across the world, receive the best possible care and access to technologies which have been shown to provide patient benefit.

This was then published in Hospital IT Europe