Output details

NHS adoption of NHS-developed technologies

This output reports the findings of research looking at healthcare technology innovation. It was funded by the National Institute of Health Research (grant received £ 234,264). The purpose of the research was to investigate whether the adoptability of healthcare technologies designed and developed by clinical and other staff within the UK’s National Health Service is greater than that of technologies with a wholly commercial pedigree. It follows earlier work on user-led innovation in Storey, Fortune, Savory and Johnson, (2011), ‘The adoption and rejection patterns of practitioner-developed technologies: a review, a model and a research agenda’, International Journal of Innovation Management. The research had two stages. Stage 1 identified 33 technologies that had been designed and developed within the NHS and by conducting interviews with the staff, their industrial partners (if any), and adopters, built up a data set on the characteristics of the range of technologies. In stage 2, six technologies were taken forward for further study and each of these paired with a similar technology with wholly commercial origins. Further primary and secondary research data was gathered to build these pairs of comparative case studies. Similarities and differences were identified in technologies and their adoption. The research shows that the origin of a designed technology affects adoptability in terms of both the extent of adoption (within a site and across sites) and the level of success achieved in an individual adopting site. It also indicated how to increase the proportion of NHS-developed technologies that gain a positive advantage from their NHS origin. However, the research also showed that several adoption problems encountered by NHS designed technologies are shared by those designed externally. This led to a number of recommendations which apply to general technology adoption in the NHS.