Accelerating Innovation Systems: Supporting ICBs to drive system-wide innovation adoption

To continue meeting the evolving health needs of the population and address widening inequalities, the NHS must fundamentally transform how health and care services are delivered. Central to this transformation is the ability of health systems to develop a more strategic, coordinated approach to adopting proven innovations where they can have the greatest impact. 

Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) are crucial in making this happen. Through their strategic commissioning role, they can identify priority areas for change, align partners around shared ambitions, and mobilise the resources required to deliver them. 

Guide for ICBs

As part of our role on The Health Foundation’s Accelerating Innovation Systems programme, we’ve developed a practical guide designed to support ICBs to develop the necessary strategic approaches to adopting high-impact innovations. 

This guide draws on lessons learnt by ICBs and HINs we’ve worked with over the last 12 months, and includes examples of how ICBs can: 

• Provide stewardship of a shared, system-wide innovation strategy and portfolio aligned to local and national priorities
   
• Incentivise, enable and sustain the adoption of high impact, strategically-aligned, evidence-based innovations through the targeted application of existing commissioning levers

Our approach 

To understand the optimal role that ICBs can play in driving innovation adoption, we brought together our cohort of ICBs and HINs for a series of online and in-person peer learning workshops. 

In these sessions, we explored the existing roles that ICBs have been playing to support innovation and how their role needs to evolve in line with the changing NHS operating model as outlined in the 10 Year Health Plan for England. 

Alongside this we conducted interviews with key individuals from across the nine ICBs and their HIN partners, as well as a range of other local partners and national stakeholders. 

Together, these activities generated rich insights into how ICBs can draw on lessons from the past few years and make best use of their strategic commissioning role and functions to accelerate the uptake of impactful innovation across their systems.