Evidence and guidance alone do not change practice. A multitude of factors are influential upon whether a particular health technology is adopted in practice. The adoption team at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) engages with healthcare professionals to develop specifically tailored support for the adoption of NICE health technology assessments (NICE medical technologies, diagnostics and technology appraisal guidance).

The NICE adoption team uses a structured process which involves engagement of healthcare professionals with experience or knowledge of the technology to identify the barriers to adoption. This information is used to populate the topic selection tool which presents the impact of adopting the technology under five headings: care pathway change; finance; difficulty to implement; education; and, patient acceptance. The result indicates which guidance would benefit from adoption support: plan and develop tailored solutions to address barriers to adoption which include a resource impact assessment and targeted communications; quality assure; and, publish tailored resources.

Examples of tailored outputs include: adoption resources sharing real world experiences of sites that have adopted the technology; and, NICE pilot projects, where the adoption team work closely with sites to support adoption of the technology at a local level. The team then share learning and results from the project to facilitate: engagement with national planning groups to coordinate wider scale adoption; resource impact assessments which help local cost impact of adoption to be estimated; engagement with general and specialist media; and, influencing national tariff.

NICE's processes have evolved to facilitate the development of a wider variety of more tailored resources, to support adoption of NICE health technology assessments guidance into practice. We will continue to engage with healthcare professionals and be responsive in our processes to ensure the packages of adoption support are tailored to need.