HEALTHCARENational Innovation Centre www. nic. nhs. uk Commissioning innovation - sharing the learning As well as carrying out its dual pol-icy agenda, the NIC also works, on behalf of the DH, across other government departments to de-velop innovative commissioning systems and measurement tools. One of the key aims in doing this is to share innovation across or-ganisation boundaries in order to leverage success, minimise dupli-cation of effort and maximise the potential to collaborate. The NIC is also developing a new service that will scan for new technology on the horizon - both in the UK and internationally. Measuring innovation Efforts to understand how we measure and absorb innovation in a public- sector context are be-ing led nationally by DBIS and globally by OECD. As one of the future pillars of the UK economy, life sciences and healthcare tech-nology will need to measure the impact that healthcare innova-tion programmes are making. The Department of Health and The NHS National Innovation Centre are playing an active role in evaluating progress. Initial ideas include: . Measuring the value of inno-vations to UK PLC ( a financial measure); . Measuring the value of in-novations to patients ( a QALY measure); . A measure indicating whether staff feel that the NHS is an in-novative place to work ( a staff survey measure); . A measure that shows the vol-ume of ideas that are generat-ed, grown and diffused in the NHS ( a quantitative measure). Thorough measurement will help to indicate if programmes are working and, importantly, reveal much sooner where goals are not being met. The programme will also develop a simple and useful set of organisational innovation metrics which will provide a di-agnostic tool that organisations can use themselves to assess and improve their ability to innovate and/ or contribute to the innova-tion ecology. Back to the Future The primary aim of the NIC's emerging horizon scanning func-tion, run on behalf of the DH, is to identify the existing medical technology innovations in other countries as well as the innova-tions that are likely to come to the market in five to seven years' time. The NIC horizon scanning service will also profile future technologies on its Showcase http:// www. showcase. nic. nhs. uk/ and the horizon scanning sec-tion of the website will provide decision- makers with easy, online access to innovation information to inform their strategic invest-ment decisions. Brian Winn says: " Innovation is clearly the buzz word of the dec-ade, but to realise its potential, we need to go beyond the word itself. We need to ask ourselves how we are going to get those innovations into use - and quick-ly. We also need to make sure the lessons we are learning in healthcare are shared across the economy as a whole." A Reading- based SME ap-proached the NIC in 2007 with a prototype for a non- invasive blood glucose meter. The idea was that a hand- held meter would replace the finger stick methods currently used by people with diabetes to test blood glucose levels and, instead, would take a painless reading from the eye. MD, Dan Daly, said: " I put the product through the NIC's web-based ' Scorecard' to begin with, and carried out a confidential assessment myself of the device using the NIC's rigorous tools. I then contacted the NIC and asked for further support. Their advice on markets, business strategy, legal requirements and arranging NHS introductions for validation was invaluable". Dr Dan Daly, innovator of the hand- held meter, sought help from the NIC's online and added value- advice services Stimulating the Market - a case study