Key Features
The SBRI Healthcare Phase 3 funding competition invites innovations at an advanced stage of development to accelerate their uptake into relevant health or social care settings.
Programme: SBRI
Award: Share of up to £500,000
Opens: 31st Jul 2024
Closes: 18th Sep 2024
The SBRI Healthcare Phase 3 funding: competition 26 – Stroke invites innovations at an advanced stage of development to accelerate their uptake into relevant health or social care settings. The aim of the competition is to facilitate the collection of evidence in real-world settings and build on the value proposition required by commissioners and regulators to make purchasing or other recommendations and decisions.
There is no shortage of innovation in the NHS or the health sector more widely. However, innovation has not diffused as quickly, or had the impact seen in other industries, particularly in reshaping how clinical services are delivered. This is despite the NHS having natural advantages over many other health systems including universal coverage of a diverse population, national standards, and relatively rich healthcare data.
Real-world validation of an innovation can accelerate its uptake and bring benefits to both industry, and health and social care by facilitating the adoption and spread of innovation. This may be achieved by providing potential adopting organisations with an understanding of the implementation pathway and assurance of benefit delivery. Alongside this, real world validation can support industry to generate investment and enhance a product’s sales story to enable growth and job creation.
Stroke is the second largest cause of death worldwide and fourth in the United Kingdom, with over 100,000 stroke admissions and around 35,000 stroke deaths per year (Stroke Association, 2024). The prevention, treatment and management of the illnesses and deaths caused by stroke carry vast economic consequences, not only for the healthcare system and patients but across society as a whole. For example, stroke is the major cause of acquired disability in adults, with 1.3 million stroke survivors living with disabilities in the UK and requiring support to carry out daily activities (Stroke Association, 2024).
When a stroke happens in an individual of working age – estimated to be 1 case every 4 (Stroke association, 2018) – the survivor’s employment prospect is reduced, leading to a further insurgence of episodes of anxiety and depression and to a loss of productivity for society.
The NHS Long Term Plan (LTP) has been set to improve the quality of its service and care of stroke patients and to reduce the loss of independent lives to stroke by early identification of at-risk patients, and the provision of support to patients to help them manage their condition. It aims to make specialist care and treatments available to more patients in a more timely and efficient manner, and further enhance the delivery of rehabilitation to improve their recovery.
The priorities identified in the NHS LTP vision are to:
• Prevent stroke by identifying and supporting people with atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, all of which increase stroke risk.
• Make sure more patients get the best treatment by:
*Improving rapid access to appropriate brain imaging, thrombolytic (clot-busting) drugs and thrombectomy (clot extraction) treatment to help achieve the goal of ensuring all eligible patients receive thrombolysis by 2025.
*Modernising the stroke workforce with a focus on cross-specialty and train hospital consultants from a variety of relevant disciplines to offer mechanical thrombectomy.
*Improving the ability to deliver rehabilitation interventions recommended in clinical guidelines.
* Increasing availability and quality of integrated community stroke rehabilitation services.
* Enabling more stroke patients to leave hospitals earlier and receive tailored and personalised care to facilitate a good recovery at home working in partnership with voluntary organisations including the Stroke Association.
• Create new 24/7 integrated stroke care pathways across the country to make sure that patients receive high quality care and treatment sooner.
It has been observed that stroke prevalence differs according to age, sex, occupation, ethnic groups and localities and this difference has an impact on the whole stroke pathway, from prevention and acute care to rehabilitation and the community. Globally, people of low socioeconomic status are more likely to have a stroke and have higher mortality rates and risk factors. People living in low-income countries have poorer access to stroke services and treatment, with poorer outcomes. In England, cardiovascular diseases (including stroke and TIA) occur more frequently in people living in more deprived areas and are twice as prevalent in the most deprived areas in England than the least.
Challenges
The challenges of dealing with stroke stem from the fact that it is a medical emergency requiring rapid diagnosis and hyperacute treatment followed by complex long-term consequences that need to be tackled at different levels and at different times after onset, often for many years.
Under thisPhase 3 Funding Competition,three challenges have been identified via consultation with clinicians and other stakeholders working in provision of care across the spectrum and review of the James Lind Alliance Stroke Priority Setting Partnership for Stroke Research:
1) Early diagnosis
2) Rehabilitation
3) Life after stroke
Applicants are expected to respond to one or more of the categories and should consider if their solution is specific to or can be tailored to one of the categories, whilst being mindful of the broader impact.
Emphasis should be placed on how the technology/solution will address any challenges associated with health inequalities, such as demographic and geographic disparities, and it is expected that applicants provide details on how they will address these e.g. provide details on the care pathway the intervention will affect and how it can improve this.
For further information on these challenges, please see here
The competition is open to any innovation (e.g., medical device, in-vitro diagnostic, digital health solutions and AI solutions, behavioural interventions, and service improvements) that meets the entry criteria and the challenges described below.
Single organisations (contracts are executed with individual legal entities) based in the UK or EU from the private, public and third sectors, including companies (large corporates and small and
medium enterprises), charities, universities, and NHS Foundation Trusts, given a strong commercial strategy is provided, are eligible to apply.
Organisations based outside the UK or EU with innovations in remit for this call can apply as subcontractors of a lead UK/EU based organisation or via a UK or EU subsidiary.
Collaborations are encouraged in the form of subcontracted services as appropriate.
All proposals should also be aware that the following will be excluded:
● Basic research and innovations in the creation phase.
● Systems and solutions that will not easily integrate or communicate with NHS/community setting systems. Some evidence of interoperability and/or work to assess this will be required.
● Technologies that do not comply with GDPR policies.
● Technologies that may increase burden on the workforce.
● Wellness or wellbeing digital applications on healthy diet and/or physical exercising.
● Technologies that will exacerbate health inequalities (including digital exclusion or data inequalities) and inequity of access to care e.g., digital technologies that are inaccessible to certain communities that experience digital poverty.
● Innovations that are not co-designed with patients and end users.
The aim of the funding is to generate real-world evidence to support rapid local or regional roll out of the innovation. Awarded proposals are expected to demonstrate some of the following exit points upon project completion:
• Implementation effectiveness demonstrated and a defined implementation guide produced where appropriate.
• Evidence of health and financial impact: health economics analysis (i.e., cost benefit analysis, budget impact model).
• Collation of evidence in response to NICE Early Value Assessment recommendations and related Evidence Generation Plan and/or towards full NICE guidance
• Innovation independently evaluated to demonstrate its impact in real-world settings.
• Environmental and sustainability assessment and impact.
• Equality and Health Inequalities impact assessment.
• Partnership developed for implementation in multiple sites.
• NHS Business case (e.g., procurement business cases to support transition into business-as-usual via standard commissioning routes, inclusion for national commissioning initiatives, inclusion on procurement frameworks, etc).
• Defined commissioning or procurement approach.
• Other relevant evidence to ensure local adoption following project completion, and plans for further spread and adoption (e.g., scaling-up plan and strategic plan towards adoption
and spread, marketing tools development).
• Company scaling plan (e.g., staff, money, supply, etc).
Please consult the Guidance for Applicants for more details.
This SBRI Healthcare competition is funded by the AAC in partnership with the Health Innovation Network to facilitate the collection of evidence in real-world settings and build on the value proposition of mature products for adoption and spread. The projects will be selected primarily on their potential value to the health service and social care system, and on the improved outcomes delivered for those in receipt of care.
The Phase 3 funding competition runs in one phase only and is intended to facilitate the implementation of developed innovations. Contracts will be for a maximum of 12 months and
up to £500,000 (NET) per project.
The implementation will be 100% funded and suppliers for each project will be selected by an open competition process and retain the intellectual property rights (IPR) generated from the
project, with certain rights of use retained by the NHS.
Book an appointment to speak to one of our advisors to discuss your eligibility to apply for this Grant Funding opportunity.
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