Overview
The latest SBRI Healthcare competition has been launched by NHS England in partnership with the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) to find innovative new products and services to combat 2 focuses:
- Dentistry, Oral Health and Oral Cancers
- Improving Outcomes in Musculoskeletal Disorders
The competition is running in 2 phases:
- Phase 1, to show technical feasibility of the proposed concept
- Phase 2, to develop prototypes/demo units from the successful proposed phase 1 projects.
Scope
For the dental category, the challenges to be addressed are:
- Improving Oral Health for Children & Young People including Tooth Decay, Inequalities, Improving communication between Dentistry, GPs and Secondary Care
- Oral Cancers – Triage, Diagnostics and Patient Outcomes including primary care diagnostic tools, cost and availability of equipment, better technology to improve patient care, treatment and rehabilitation
For the musculoskeletal category, the challenges to be addressed are:
- Self-Care and Preventative Interventions including technology to inform patients and healthcare professionals of pathways for prevention and treatment e.g. interactive and virtual services, and technology to help patients self-manage their condition
- Efficiencies in Delivering Care including Post Surgical Rehabilitation and Surgical Revisions
- Scaling Up the use of Regenerative Medicine including the increase of manufacturing capacity in the UK for cell production, increase the ease of administration and decrease the cost of each treatment and develop allogeneic cell products
Considerations
For either categories, organisations applying are asked to consider:
- How will the proposed solution impact on the clinical care pathway, and how will the care pathway need to be changed in order to deliver system-wide benefits?
- How will you ensure that the technology will be acceptable to patients (and their families) and to healthcare workers? How could these groups be involved in the development of the innovation?
- How will you ensure that the technology is affordable to the NHS both immediately and throughout the life of the product? What health economics evidence will the NHS require before the technology can be adopted?
Eligibility
To be eligible for this funding you must:
- be a single company or organisation from the private, public and third sectors, including charities
The competition is particularly suited to SME’s as the contracts are of relatively small value and operate on short timescales.
Funding Costs
The development contracts placed will be for a maximum of 6 months and up to £100,000 (inc. VAT) per project.
Developments 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.