In our latest interview we asked Suzanne Ali-Hassan, Head of Commercial Engagement at UCLPartners, a few questions about the organisation, innovation and adoption into health and care.
Can you tell me about you and your organisation?
I’m a molecular biologist by background so was grounded in the life sciences, however, I was always interested in opportunities outside of the lab. Following my Masters, I was very lucky to secure my first position at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) which exposed me to the incredible translational research infrastructure across England where I worked on a number of national programmes. Following that, I joined an organisation which represented the North of England’s health and life sciences capabilities, the Northern Health Science Alliance. I have always been industry facing but sitting in a unique position at the interface between industry, the NHS, academia and government policy. I am now Head of Commercial Engagement at UCLPartners.
UCLPartners is one of the 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSN) in England but also contains the Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC), the North Thames NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN) and the NIHR Applied Research Collaborative (ARC). This is a unique, complete ecosystem, bridging from the academic community through to clinical and evaluation expertise and then adoption by the health system – the entire innovation pathway across a population of 6 million people.
The Commercial & Innovation Team focuses on supporting industry to embed their technology in the NHS and advises industry partners on the evidence required to support the product or technology to be adopted by the health system. The evidence bases we focus on are in three parts: clinical evidence (it does what it says it does and it is safe), financial (health economics but also budget impact modelling) and vitally real world evidence (how does this new innovation or product work in practice). Alongside this, we also work closely with our NHS partners to articulate the needs and challenges within the system. This is essential to ensure we are acting on innovation pull, rather than technology push.
Can you talk me through some case studies that you have been working on?
We work with over a 100 companies through the course of a year, some for light touch advice and others a bit more intensively. We offer Market Insight Briefings on a monthly basis to small groups of companies with non-competing interests. These provide some general insights into the NHS, as well as considerations and complexities around adoption and procurement by the health system. If a company is fairly well evidenced and further along in their journey, we work with them on a one to one basis with bespoke support and guidance. When we feel that they have got to the point where there is robust evidence and a compelling business proposition, we build awareness of that product within our member hospitals and partners. So, we are not an extension of their sales team, but we present good ideas and opportunities to our NHS network.
Real world evidence is also key to a product being adopted at scale and we can help companies find a partner NHS Trust to evaluate their product in a live environment. Most recently, we have supported Oxehealth engage with one of our hospital sites to evaluate their product whilst it is being implemented. Our partner hospital expressed an interest in this type of technology and we were able to connect with the company. Making the most of this time, while the product is being adopted, we will support them to gather information that demonstrates that impact on the service and its true benefits – as well as any challenges throughout implementation and other learnings.
Have you been working on the DATACAN project?
Yes on the periphery, the DATA-CAN project is being run out of UCLPartners since its launch in September 2019. It is such an exciting initiative linking together cancer data sets from across the UK and will be an incredible asset to industry and researchers. There is a project team supporting the programme and if companies are interested, they should please email datacan@uclpartners.com.
What would you say is your organisation’s key achievement over the past 12 months?
We could highlight quite a number of achievements across the organisation – such as the new resources for implementing non face-to-face clinics we are launching next week; our innovation adoption fund that has invested in a range of exciting patient safety projects across our patch; and our innovative virtual clinics for atrial fibrillation.
Within the Commercial Team, we have supported a number of products to be adopted by our NHS partners including those on national programmes like Heartflow at the Royal Free and Barts Health.
We are also a partner on the UK’s first personalised medicine accelerator, P4, in partnership with UCL, Capital Enterprise and Barclays Eagle Labs and we are selecting its second cohort. This will provide AI powered, precision medicine technologies accelerate through development and get traction with the NHS. UCLPartners is providing bespoke support in the context of the NHS and advice to help them get adopted by the health system.
What will you hope to achieve over the next 12 months?
UCLPartners has a renewed focus on Mental Health and Cardiovascular Disease so by building out those programmes, we hope to provide a unique test bed and infrastructure to enable innovation and real health system change to benefit the population. The Commercial Team will obviously work more broadly than those therapy areas, however, so I think for us it is ensuring that we are responding to the needs of the health system, working more with our partners to ask ‘what do you need, and what are the challenges you are facing?’ then translating that out to industry and working with commercial organisations to develop proper solutions for the NHS, not just point interventions. That is our ambition going forward.
What advice would you give to a company at the very early stages of development?
I would say the crucial thought should be to have your end user in mind; an idea or exciting piece of technology is great but you need to ensure there is a market for the product and an actual need. There appears to be a disconnect between companies and the working reality of the end user, so we advise companies to find out their customer very early on in their journey.
What are the general and technical challenges that face companies at the moment?
The NHS is focused on becoming a learning health system so ensuring a technology is interoperable and enabled to push any data collected back into the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is really important. Alongside this technical challenge, the NHS is an ever evolving system and is constantly being restructured with new entities and organisations created all the time e.g. Primary Care Networks, Integrated Care Systems etc. This can really confuse companies and the ecosystem requires navigating somewhat to find the best relationships, however, the AHSNs are set up to help with this.
What are some of the learnings that you are finding from companies you are currently working with?
Every NHS trust is different, that is perhaps an obvious one, but internal processes and decision making can alter dramatically from one site to another. Also, the implementation of the product requires resource from the company – not just financial but also people power. The company needs to have someone on site and available to support the hospital make this change. Offering this helps a hospital mitigate risk and concern for trying something new, it can go a long way at building a sustainable business and relationships with the NHS.
