Health Innovation Challenge Fund - monitoring of chronic illness in the home and remote settings

Closing Date: 01 October 2010

General Information:

The Health Innovation Challenge Fund (HICF) is a £100 million, five-year parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health. The funders are collaborating to stimulate the creation of innovative healthcare products, technologies and interventions, and facilitate their development for the benefit of patients in the NHS and beyond. The HICF will have a succession of thematic calls for proposals, each selected to focus on unmet needs in healthcare relevant to the NHS, and will support innovative developments that are within three to five years of launch or adoption.

The Department of Health is uniquely placed, as both a healthcare system provider and a major R&D funder, to pioneer the evaluation of innovative products within the context of the patient treatment pathway at all levels of healthcare, including the community.

Priorities for the HICF are:

• encourage innovative products for patient benefit
• improve the uptake of new technological advances into patient management pathways
• integrate the clinical, research, informatics and product development communities.

The funders are collaborating to stimulate the creation of innovative healthcare products, technologies and interventions, and to facilitate their development for the benefit of patients in the NHS and beyond.

The third theme for HICF is monitoring of chronic illness in the home and remote settings.

The Challenge

The increased incidence of chronic diseases and conditions presents a huge challenge not just to the NHS but worldwide. ‘Long term conditions’ or ‘chronic diseases’ are those that can only be controlled and not, at present, cured. They include diabetes, asthma, arthritis, heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia and a range of disabling neurological or behavioural conditions such as anxiety or depression.

Living with a long term condition has a significant impact on a person’s quality of life and on their family. The incidence of such conditions increases with age. Many older people are living with more than one chronic condition and this means that they face particular challenges, both medical and social.

The care of people with chronic conditions also consumes a large proportion of health and social care resources. People with chronic conditions are significantly more likely to see their GP (accounting for about 80% of GP consultations), to be admitted as in-patients, and to use more in-patient days than those without such conditions.

The World Health Organisation has identified that such conditions will be the leading cause of disability by 2020 and that, if not successfully managed, will become the most expensive problem for health care systems.

Aims & Objectives
It is believed that a greater shift towards self-monitoring and ideally self-management could make a significant positive impact on patient care and reduce the burden on acute care resources.The medical devices and information systems available today, or in the very near future, could make this a reality.However, improvements will only be realised where technologies integrate seamlessly with the operational processes specific to the healthcare system and only if they are embraced by the patient, their carers and health professionals.

For the purposes of this call, long term conditions may include, for example, coronary heart disease, stroke and transient ischaemic attack, hypertension, diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, epilepsy, heart failure, arthritis, severe mental health conditions and neurological disorders.

We are seeking solutions that will make a tangible difference and in particular:

• Better use, modification or re-purposing of current technologies to facilitate their practical use in the home by patients, family members and health professionals.
• Technology systems and platforms that use ‘open’ standards and which will encourage technology providers to build innovative solutions around them and reduce entry barriers.
• Monitoring methods that engage the patient on an ongoing basis and motivate the patient to take the appropriate self-management action.Methodologies that prevent the patient escalating to the next care level are particularly important
• Processes and monitoring systems that can adapt to the health-risk, specific condition, age, environment and ‘behavioural-type’ of the patient.
• Proposals that address compliance of the elderly and low-symptomatic, chronically ill. This is a major issue needing new solutions.
• New technologies and information systems that offer improved front-end data capture, accessibility and dissemination throughout the appropriate areas of the healthcare system such as data fusion between social care and clinical judgement aspects.
• Projects with evidence of an effective cohesion of engineering, social & clinical sciences.
• Achievement of an optimal balance between the amount of face-to-face care and remote monitoring by health professionals.

How to Apply:

Applicants should submit a preliminary application including the following information:

• an outline of the work packages that are to be undertaken using Wellcome Trust/Department of Health funding including details of specific milestones, objectives and deliverables
• current validation of the concept, how it addresses a medical need, position on patient management pathway or disease algorithm
• downstream route to launch, market introduction and adoption
• sensitivity or risk analysis for the major hurdles
• an overview of intellectual property and regulatory approval issues
• eventual financial sustainability of the product line
• an approximate breakdown of costs
• justification for requesting Wellcome Trust/Department of Health funds - if the applicant is a company
• details of all information which an applicant considers commercially sensitive or confidential.

Assessment process
Assessment of preliminary applications will be through an expert committee including representatives from the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health but that is independent of both and whose role is advisory only. Preliminary applications will be shortlisted and those applicants invited to submit a full application. Details on the full application process will be provided at that time.

As part of the review process, full applications will undergo external peer review and applicants will also be required to present their proposal to a Wellcome Trust/Department of Health Joint Funding Panel. During this review process the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health will exchange information contained in the application and peer review

• Preliminary application deadline: 1 October 2010 (17.00)
• Shortlisting of proposals: early November 2010
• Full applications submitted: 10 January 2011 (17.00)
• Funding decisions: April 2011

Eligibility:

Please note that the ‘Lead Applicant’ for all HICF awards must be a UK organisation or company.

The following types of organisation (singly or in collaboration) will be eligible for funding:

• NHS organisations (including NHS Trusts and NHS Foundation Trusts), and equivalent UK authorities
• universities, and research institutes and not-for profit organisations
• start-up companies founded to capture and develop intellectual property of relevance to healthcare 
• biotechnology, pharmaceutical, bioinformatics, engineering or other companies.

A collaboration between two or more of the entities detailed above is also eligible and encouraged where it strengthens the overall proposal.

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