How we can we utilise all the skills and experience of the SMEs to work together?
Building an ecosystem in the Liverpool city region is vital. The role of the eHealth Cluster is part of the business support roadmap, bringing local SMEs who are driving innovation, into that ecosystem by providing specialist business support and advice.
What we want for the future is the for the cluster to be driven by the SMEs with the support around it so it isn’t driven by a public body. We’re looking to work with Innovate Dementia in the future to see how they have succeeded.
Hearing from;
Liverpool City Council
Liverpool CCG
NWC AHSN
Open Labs
YMCA Case Study
Ann Williams, Liverpool City Council
I am the iNnovation Network lead for Liverpool City Region. LCC have led on the Innovation Network and we’re not looking at a city-region innovation network.
The iNnovation Network is a groups of Liverpool commissioners, service providers, user-led organisations, creatives and technologists who came together to unpick some of the big challenges facing the delivery of quality health and social care services in a time of austerity.
We have been successful thanks to the vibrant SME community in the city, We do get approached from the likes of the big guys, they can come in and do flash presentation about what they can do and solve our problems, who often don’t have an idea of what the local authority’s budget is.
The key achievements have involved the UK’s first Adult Social Care Hack Day, a series of innovative round tables on trend topics along with iNnovationXchange unconferences. Remind Me and the development of Helping Hands have been a key part of the products delivered. Remind Me is working on a trial with elderly Chinese patients and can be exported to China which is good for the city.
Our future plans involve the development of a framework contract to deliver communication through events and collaboration, the development of funding for new technology and big ideas for the whole City Region. I want to see more robotics along with sensor and app technology.
Dave Horsfield, Liverpool CCG
We’re working with a variety of partners, including innovate UK. What we’ve been working with is the eHealth Cluster to get it to happen rather than talk about it. We need to demystify the nightmare that is the NHS with different procurement departments, ideas and at the CCG we’re trying to simplify that.
We have an absolute determination to open up the door to our SMEs. What we’ve done is created a platform for records and then get people to create apps that can sit there. As long as they play by the rules then we’ll let it be market driven and they can access the data. It’s about letting the market get involved at self-care because we’re not that great at it. We’ve got to let those who can really move and really push enable it and make it happen.
Digital services are about how people connect with the NHS on health. Healthy Liverpool is as important to us as people getting into A&E. It’s about how we truly engage with that new age. The SMEs are going to do it but we’ll give them the platform and tell them how they need to access it to do it.
We work locally, regionally and nationally and a lot of our work is done in Liverpool. I’ve been on the steering group of the cluster before it started approaching SMEs. We’ve been tasked with doing this and it’s very much delivered by the cluster.
Nationally, we’re very involved with test beds; we’ve got four potential sites in the region that have bid. In London tomorrow, the Life Sciences Minister is running the Accelerated Access Review looking at the barriers getting products to market. We also work with the SBRI programme, first phase funding is £100k, second phase is £1m. We can help to shape bids.
Procurement has been mentioned as one of the barriers. We are running workshops to take about innovation and procurement, something we’re discussing nationally. There is a competition underway to get over the barriers for procurement. In October we have jointly funded with the LCR Lep a hackathon at the new Alder Hey Facility.
Jason Taylor, LJMU Open Labs
Our job is to identify new opportunities and kickstart projects to make it happen. Many academic partners are used to connecting with
new partners and we help them. We’ve talked at hack days, unconferences but we’re always about getting interesting businesses into our space and developing new ideas.
Tom Dawson Rescon, Chris Morland Citrus Suite, Andrew Michaelson Care Innovation
Remind Me is an app we developed with Innovate Dementia. We realised as we developed it that it would work well for other health issues so we looked to collaborate to develop new ideas.
YMCA is a great example of the work that is done. Their Ways of Hope programme is for people with complex needs with a long history of mental health, substance abuse and poor general health. The two key challenges put forward was that people tend to do funny things with their cookers, drying trousers etc. This can cause fires and injury. Because of the vulnerability of the people on the programme there is a lot of human contact, walking into people’s flats uninvited can be a source of friction. They wanted to minimise that face to face contact while still keeping safeguarding in place.
Care Innovation has a product called Stove Guard which helped to reduce the amount of fires. Remind Me would work but it needed an application to offer push notification for staff to send to the people within YMCA as reminders. It will be going live as a trial in the next couple of weeks.
“It was a brilliant rewarding process to build something that could support people living with dementia as we made Remind Me”, says Chris. “It was different going in to the YMCA. We were able to go through the app, show them the features but we needed more discussion with the staff there to advise us on behaviour and safeguards. The staff wanted control of the app to be able to send reminders to individuals with specific needs”.
Originally the app was to be delivered on Huddle tablets but they would be sold. Instead we developed a wall-mounted heavy duty metal solution.
Tom from Rescon had been doing work with an app with YMCA with an app that measures how people are doing and feeling, it turns it into accurate data. A self-reporting act it takes history as a bio-marker.