Methodology

We provide a foundational platform for the work carried out in each of our clinical priority areas. It encompasses clinically relevant activities, focusing on the development of approaches, platforms, and talent to facilitate the translation of HealthTech.

A cross-cutting Methodology theme that develops approaches, and support platforms and people to enable the translation of HealthTech developments into the clinic.

Leads

Headshot of Dr Emmanuel Akinluyi

Dr Emmanuel Akinluyi

HRC Deputy Director and Theme Lead
Dr Emmanuel (Didi) Akinluyi is the HRC Deputy Director and Theme Lead of Methodology. He is the Chief Biomedical Engineer at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and joint Head of Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering, leading one of the largest Clinical Engineering Departments in the UK. In this capacity he leads on the safe and effective purchase, use and care of medical devices. He has overall responsibility for the implementation of medical devices policy and for achieving optimal compliance with legislation and best practice guidance in all areas using medical devices. He is a practising Consultant Clinical Scientist holding doctorates in Healthcare System Design, on forecasting and extracting value from 'Medical Technological Infrastructure'. He continues to lead work on modelling the impact of devices on patient outcomes.
Additionally he is the deputy Chief Medical Officer at Guy’s & St Thomas’, tasked with supporting technology translation, research, and innovation in practice development. As a London Clinical Engineering network lead, he plays an advisory role on technology translation and exploitation via the NHS England Chief-Scientific-Office's National Clinical Engineering Network, DHSC's Med Tech Directorate, and work with the MHRA.

Didi plays a core role in the training and academic teaching of the nation’s Clinical Scientists in Clinical Engineering, speaking to issues and opportunities for our scientific workforce with health system leaders (locally, and in NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care). He personally delivers or coordinates 4 modules as part the only NHSE-accredited MSc for training Clinical Engineering in England (At King's College London). He created/introduced the Healthcare Technology Design and Healthcare System design modules, and defined Systems-thinking and Design-methodology aspects of the updated curriculum for this professional group, while working with the National School for Healthcare Science within NHS England. He has delivered the Healthcare Technology Design module he created, to every NHS Clinical Scientist in Clinical Engineering trained on the Scientific Training Programme in the last decade. He is among our team seeking to uplift the HealthTech-translation workforce as part of the HRC’s capability building activities and will similarly work to embed HealthTech research practice in the training of future generations.

Didi has first-hand experience of the translational journey: He is an inventor and innovator, with patents for devices spanning clinical specialisms.

Dr Anna Barnes

Co-Theme Lead
Dr Anna Barnes is the Co-Theme Lead of Methodology. She is also the Director of the King's Technology Evaluation Centre (KiTEC) and the joint head of Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering. She is a HCPC registered Clinical Scientist (Medical Physics), and the current (2023-25) President of the Inst of Physics and Engineering in Medicine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annapbarnes/
KiTEC specialises in providing developer-focused Health Technology Assessments (HTA) for medical devices at the prototype and pre-CE/UKCA marking stages. Our approach aligns with the NICE Evidence Standards Framework, ensuring that digital health technologies (DHTs) are evaluated rigorously and meet regulatory and market demands.

We assist developers in embedding user acceptability into their designs through Public and Patient Involvement (PPI), stakeholder engagement, and qualitative research, ensuring that health and care inequalities are considered and mitigated. Our services include evidence generation planning, peer review, and pathway mapping to describe both current and proposed systems, demonstrating the health, cost, and resource impacts of new technologies.

We further support the demonstration of DHT performance through retrospective and prospective research, clinical trials, and real-world evidence generation, ensuring the technologies deliver the claimed benefits in practice. Our economic evaluations provide budget impact and cost-effectiveness analyses, particularly for devices with higher financial risks. For deployment, we focus on data transparency and strategies for communication and consent, ensuring that DHTs are understood and accessible to end users.

KiTEC has nearly a decade of experience in its current form, with a track record of academic excellence and a vast clinical network within Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT), one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK. As an External Evaluation Centre, we collaborate closely with the NICE Medical Technology Assessment Committee and were commissioned to provide independent Health Economic and Outcomes Research facilitation for AAC/NIHR AI-Award winners.

We focus entirely on developing the knowledge and resources required to embed a developer focussed HTA framework required to offer rapid progress of novel medical devices along the translational pipeline and the tools needed to monitor performance post deployment.

The flow is as follows. Opportunity space (Search opportunistically and Prioritise with conviction) to Problem space (Explore with discourse and Define challenges with precision) to Solution space (Generate possibilities with creativity and diversity and Refine solutions with endeavour) to Deploy efficiently.

 

The cross-cutting Methodology Theme will use health technology assessment frameworks to underpin the work undertaken in each of the clinical priority areas identified by our four Clinical Themes.

We develop and implement the means to:

A. Pipeline Optimisation – Signposting, consolidating and collating existing resources at GSTT NHS foundation trust and the London Inst. for Healthcare Engineering at King’s College London.

B. Capacity Building – Providing short accelerated practical courses in health technology assessment, trial statistics and health economics specifically aimed at NHS healthcare professionals. The courses are designed to allow people at any stage in their NHS career to grasp the fundamentals of currently used HTA frameworks from a NHS perspectives.

C. Assessment of HealthTech@Home – Partnering up with engineers across GSTT, KCL and commercial providers to co-create HTA tools suitable for pre-and post-deployment evaluation designed to keep patients at the focus of all improvement plans. Access to data is key.

D. Data & Informatics  Enhanced HealthTech Research – The King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub has just been launched with several data management platforms available for training and testing AI and other predictive algorithms. We will contribute to the existing strategy and focus on streamlining access to healthcare data for health technology research innovators.