If you’ve been looking for the opportunity to introduce digital consent, and you work in the NHS in England, here’s your opportunity. And if you’ve seen digital consent as one of the highlighted technologies for adoption and acceleration, here’s our pitch to you on why Concentric should be within your ICS application.
Health Technology Adoption and Accelerator Fund (HTAAF)
The ‘Health Technology Adoption and Accelerator Fund’, or HTAAF, is an investment of £30 million by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England (NHSE) to support the adoption and acceleration of key technologies which can rapidly support the NHS in England to both improve patient care and improve efficiency. It is being managed under the same principles as the MedTech Funding Mandate (MTFM).
Six priority categories have been identified for funding, including elective recovery. Within each category are a handful of suggested technologies which are considered ready to scale, can deliver impacts this winter, and is cost-saving once in place. Full details of the application criteria can be found within the HTAAF folder on FutureNHS.
As usual for these sort of funding calls, timeframes are very tight, with applications needing to be submitted by the 27th October 2023, and submitted at an ICS level. Successful applications will then have access to the funding from late November.
Elective recovery priorities
There are 7 technologies highlighted within the elective recovery category, with digital consent named first. This, alongside how Concentric has been proven to support with application criteria elements, means that we are confident that Concentric digital consent applications have a high likelihood of being successful.
Concentric is the widest-used digital consent application in the NHS, and has been successfully introduced across NHS organisations across the spectrum of digital maturity. Why choose Concentric?
Application details
We are here to support with applications, and can support to modify our answers to the application form questions to fit your local context. Here are some key details of links regarding each element of the criteria:
Technology is regulated and can be easily incorporated into pathways to facilitate adoption at pace
Concentric meets the relevant standards for a digital consent application in the UK, as detailed in our Standards and Guidelines Conformance page. With Concentric now deployed across around 20 NHS Trusts (across a mixture of individual NHS Trust contracts and ICS-wide contracts) it is a proven technology and can be easily incorporated into pathways. Our experience with these deployments has supported the delivery of our Delivery Playbook, our stepwise guide (with all the relevant resources) to introducing Concentric across the organisation in as little as 20 weeks. Concentric can be procured via all major frameworks used by the NHS, for example via G Cloud 13, meaning that procurement should not be a barrier to implementation in Winter 2023/24.
Technology is NICE recommended
Whilst digital consent has not been subject to a NICE Technology Appraisal, Concentric does conform to the NICE Evidence Standards Framework for Digital Health Technologies, as a Tier B technology.
Technology compliant with Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC)
Concentric is compliant with, and publicly shares, how we meet each element of the DTAC.
Technology is cost saving
Health economists at QC Medica and the team at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust have recently undertaken a health economic analysis comparing the paper-based and digital consent processes. The key outcome was an economic model comparing total system costs of both processes, which can be modified to the individual organisation’s context. In most scenarios introducing Concentric is cost-saving, at around £1 cheaper per consent episode (approximately 50,000 consent episodes across an average size NHS Trust per year). The key findings are summarised in our health economic analysis page.
Benefits to the system and the patient
These are outlined in our ‘Why switch to digital consent’ page, with key relevant benefits being improving shared decision making and informed consent quality (Increase from 28% -> 72% of patients reporting gold-standard SDM), and a 5% reduction in day of surgery delays.
Contribution to reduction in carbon
In many organisations, consent is one of the last remaining paper processes. Digital transformation of a paper-based consent process reduces the organisation’s carbon footprint, through reducing paper use and supporting remote pathways. Our reduce your carbon footprint page details the ways introducing Concentric impacts carbon footprint, and our work in the area.
Contribution to reduction in health inequalities
Our Equality Impact Assessment (EQIA) template outlines how Concentric supports the reduction in health inequalities, and how the potential risks of deepening health inequalities are mitigated.
Demonstration of contribution to social value improvements
Our social value policy outlines how we at Concentric Health support tackling economic inequality, sustainability and fighting climate change, equal opportunity, and wellbeing.
Application support
Please contact us at support@concentric.health to discuss including digital consent in your HTAAF application. We’re here to support until submission date on the 27th October. Daf and Patrick will be leading on supporting teams over the application period.