Simplifying our offer for the life sciences industry

NICE has provided scientific advice to the life sciences industry for more than 13 years and has given advice on more than 550 different products along the way.

During that time, NICE’s portfolio of early support services has expanded to include variations of our traditional scientific advice service (such as a faster timelines or joint advice with partner organisations) as well as different services such as the Office for Market Access safe harbour meetings, the META Tool gap analysis or our PRIMA health economic model check.

We continually look for ways to improve our offer and stakeholders have told us the range of support services NICE provide can seem overly complex for new companies trying to understand the landscape and engage with us. We have decided to make various refinements over the next few years both to the services we provide and in how we communicate our offer to industry.

One area that we have been able to address straight away is to simplify our core scientific advice offer. From December 2022, we will discontinue our standard and express services and replace them with a single, ‘set’ scientific advice process. The new 15-week process is a hybrid of our express and standard services but with some improvements for both the internal team working on the projects and also for the company seeking advice.

The advice meeting and report will not change. The main improvement for companies using the service will be earlier access to the agenda and slide deck allowing more time ahead of the meeting to prepare.

For companies that have already booked projects with us on express or standard timelines, these will continue as expected. New projects will be scheduled using the new set timeline.

This new timeframe for seeking advice will also form the basis of our PRIMA and Medtech Advice services, which will also follow a single 15-week process going forward.

Pricing will remain unchanged for the remainder of 2022/23 and we will continue to review pricing on an annual basis in the lead up to each new financial year.

There are other tweaks and improvements that we intend to make in the short, medium and long term. These will be communicated through our channels and through the NICE newsletter for life sciences (which you can sign up for through the NICE website).

If you are interested in seeking advice or have any questions about our services or processes, feel free to get in touch through our online enquiry form.