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Department of Health and Social Care

Compass: a proof-of-concept service for evidence-based medical device procurement

A new service to help NHS clinicians and procurement teams select medical devices based on trusted evidence, peer adoption and patient outcomes.

1The client

The Department of Health and Social Care wanted to test a new idea: a service, called Compass, that would help NHS clinicians and procurement teams choose medical devices using trusted evidence, peer adoption and patient outcomes, enabling safer, value-based purchasing decisions.

2The challenge

Device procurement decisions are spread across clinicians, procurement teams and suppliers, with evidence scattered across trials, registries and peer experience. The department needed to know what such a service would do, who it was for and whether it was worth building, before committing to development.

The main objectives were to:

  • Define the product and its users through a series of stakeholder workshops
  • Map the end-to-end service as a blueprint, including the evidence sources and the people behind each step
  • Bring the concept to life with storyboards and early prototypes
  • Give the department a proof of concept it could test and take to a funding decision

3Our approach

We ran a series of workshops with clinical, procurement and policy stakeholders to define what Compass should do and where it would sit in existing processes. From that we created a service blueprint, initial storyboards and prototypes that showed how a clinician or buyer would move from a need to a confident, evidence-backed choice.

The prototypes drew on current AI models to surface and summarise evidence, with a clear human decision at the end of every journey.

Compass: illustrative service blueprintScroll sideways to follow a clinician from need to decision
Stage
Step 1Identify a need
Step 2Gather evidence
Step 3Compare options
Step 4Decide
Step 5Procure and review
Clinician or buyer
A clinical team needs a device for a procedure or patient group.
Looks for trials, registries, safety notices and peer experience.
Weighs outcomes, adoption, cost and safety.
Chooses a device and records the rationale.
Raises the order; later records how the device performed.
Front stage
Start a Compass enquiry: what, for whom, by when.
A single evidence view for the device category.
Side-by-side comparison with plain-language summaries.
Decision record with the evidence cited.
Order raised from the decision; outcome captured at review.
Back stage
Procurement is notified of the need early rather than at purchase order stage.
Evidence sources curated and kept current.
Framework and pricing data attached to each option.
Clinical governance sign-off where required.
Outcomes feed back into the evidence base for the next buyer.
Data & systems
Procurement system, clinical request.
Trials, registries, MHRA alerts, NHS supply chain, peer adoption data.
Framework agreements, pricing, outcomes data.
Decision log.
Procurement system, outcomes registry.
AI touchpoint
Retrieves and summarises evidence across sources, always showing the source.
Drafts the comparison and flags gaps or conflicting evidence for a human to check.
Suggests when a review is due and summarises reported outcomes.
As-is pain point
Needs are raised informally and surface late.
Hours spent searching a dozen places; evidence is uneven.
Comparisons are rebuilt from scratch in spreadsheets.
Rationale is lost in email, so decisions are hard to defend later.
No feedback loop: the next team starts from zero.
Illustrative and simplified from the proof-of-concept work. Not the department’s internal documentation. Every AI step hands a decision to a person.

4The results

The department has a defined proof of concept, a service blueprint and tested prototypes to take forward. Engagement ran from September 2025 to March 2026.

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