Innovation is at the heart of transforming healthcare in our region. Much our future work in this area will be driven by our Innovation Exchange, which was launched at the West of England Healthcare Innovation Expo.
Our Innovation Exchange will bring a whole system approach to matching innovation to locally identified challenges. We will do this by connecting and brokering relationships between innovators, patients, carers, industry, academia and health and care professionals, we are creating an ‘innovation ecosystem’.
We currently offer a range of business support service to innovators, and work with local commissioners and healthcare providers to identify and adopt innovative solutions. The Innovation Exchange is bringing to life our ambition to create the first comprehensive, active network of healthcare innovators across the West of England. Our ultimate goal is to pioneer getting the right innovation in the right place at the right time and at the right cost, to improve care for patients.
What the Innovation Exchange brings to our work is an even greater focus on connecting and supporting innovation. Some of this might be activities such as the STP workshops we ran recently to identify some areas that would benefit from innovation. Some of it will come with increased information sharing through the web portal we are developing. You’ll be hearing more about these in the near future.
The support services we already offer to innovators include:
- specialist one-to-one business support for innovators
- connection events, seminars and conferences
- funding calls and challenges
- entrepreneurial training and business accelerator programmes
- monthly e-newsletter and Funding Finder bulletin
- evaluation and adoption readiness toolkits
We also offer online tools that will support products and encourage innovators from across the West of England to share their ideas, build networks and form partnerships. One of these online tools is hyvr – a social networking platform that allows healthcare professionals, innovators and citizens to collectively shape ideas for new products and services, based on real world feedback.
Our business support service assists companies in developing their ideas further by connecting them through our targeted networks and resources.
Whether you are an innovator looking for help in getting your ideas developed or in healthcare and interested in helping us develop the innovation exchange you can contact us at innovation@weahsn.net and receive regular updates.
Posted on December 5, 2018
