The Technology Strategy Board, in partnership with the Department of Health (DH), is to invest up to £1m in projects to produce new and improved tools, products or capabilities in the field of health economics to assist companies in the design and evaluation of diagnostic clinical trials.

It is envisaged that the new tools will lead to better adoption of new diagnostic products, where appropriate, by providing assessors and decision-makers with high-quality data on their impact. This competition has been developed in discussion with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the British In Vitro Diagnostics Association (BIVDA).

The competition aims to generate health economics capabilities and models that will assist companies in predicting the impact of the introduction of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Applicants may directly evaluate the impact of the introduction of CE marked products to collect data to inform their models. The CE marked products and models must be for a disease or condition prioritised by DH for the Detection and Identification of Infectious Agents (DIIA) programme.

This competition is open to single companies or organisations from the private, public and third sectors, including charities. Projects can last up to 24 months and successful applications will attract a 100%-funded development contract. We expect that contracts will be in the region of £100,000 to £350,000.

There are three competitions in the DIIA innovation platform’s second series. Details of the other two, Sepsis I and Sepsis II, can also be found on this website. Together, they aim to provide a comprehensive portfolio of projects to improve the future diagnosis and management of infectious diseases and sepsis.

For more details of events related to this competition and to others in the DIIA series go to https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/DIIA