Overview
Published 25 April 2024.
Summary
The Innovation Scorecard reports on the use of medicines and medicine groupings in the NHS in England, which have been positively appraised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
From April 2024 production and publishing of the Innovation Scorecard has been transferred to the NHSBSA. Previous releases were produced by NHS England, formerly NHS Digital, and can be found on the NHS Digital website.
The Innovation Scorecard has been produced and published as an official statistic since January 2013 on behalf of the Office for Life Sciences. It is produced with full consideration of the standards set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. It can be used by local NHS organisations to monitor progress in implementing NICE Technology Appraisal (TA) recommendations.
The scorecard is produced using a range of administrative data sources before publication and no additional central data collection is involved.
In 2021, the publication series switched to using the Secondary Care Medicines data that is supplied by Rx-Info and is now published by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) through the open data portal. This data is not directly comparable with the secondary care data used in previous publications. This is because of variations in the coverage, completeness, and changes in some of the prescribing measures used to present the volume of use in this publication.
Medicines and medicine groupings
There were 190 medicines analysed.
Of the 171 medicines with prescribing in all 8 previous quarters, 125 had an increase.
Among 17 medicine groupings, 15 saw increased usage.
Medicines and medicine groupings discussed here are those specifically mentioned on the Innovation Scorecard. This includes medicines with data for each of the latest 8 quarters comparing the 12 months from January 2023 to December 2023 to the previous 12 months. Year-on-year comparisons of the volume of medicine use may have been impacted by the effects of COVID.
Reported as Assumed Daily Doses (ADD), Defined Daily Doses (DDD), mgs, vials, tablets, units, or implants per 100,000 population in England.
Interactive tool
You can find the interactive tool at our online web platform.
It may take up to 1 hour following the 9.30am release of the official publication for the web platform to become available.
Resources
Innovation Scorecard to December 2023 - key points infographic (PDF: 75KB)Innovation Scorecard to December 2023 - CSV archive - utilisation (ZIP: 2.5MB)Innovation Scorecard to December 2023 - CSV archive - groupings (ZIP: 2.6MB)Innovation Scorecard to December 2023 - estimates data (Excel: 25KB)Innovation Scorecard to December 2023 - Assumed Daily Doses (ADD) by medicine (Excel: 18KB)
Pre-release access list (HTML)
Administrative sources
The NHSBSA English Prescribing Dataset (EPD) can be found on the NHSBSA open data portal website.
The NHSBSA Secondary Care Medicines Dataset (SCMD) can be found on the NHSBSA open data portal website.
NHS England Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data can be found on the NHS England website.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) population data can be found on the ONS website.
Contact us
Questions regarding policy and strategy behind the Innovation Scorecard should be sent to the Office for Life Sciences at officeforlifesciences@bis.gsi.gov.uk. You should quote 'Innovation Scorecard' in any correspondence.
If you have any questions, comments, or would like more information, you can email the NHSBSA Official Statistics team at statistics@nhsbsa.nhs.uk.
You can complete a short survey about this publication to help the NHSBSA improve the official statistics that we produce.
All responses will remain anonymous, and individuals will not be identifiable in any report that we produce. You can view our privacy policy on our website to see how your data is used and stored.
Responsible statistician: Graham Platten