Event Theme: Patient Safety
Patient safety is the avoidance of unintended or unexpected harm to people during the delivery of health and care services. We are seeking novel medical technology solutions (medical devices, equipment, diagnostics, medical software, IT platforms, mobile apps) that prevent or reduce avoidable harm to patients across hospitals, primary care, community care, mental health services and care homes.
Improving safety is about reducing risk and minimising mistakes. Through the Eastern Patient Safety Collaborative the region aims to support NHS Improvement's national work-streams in maternity, culture and deterioration.
NHS staff are best placed to conceive and design such technology solutions. We are therefore seeking Idea Owners to come forward with their novel technology ideas to improve patient safety in a continually evolving NHS.
By way of example, and by no means limiting, some areas of interest are listed for inspiration:
- Technologies that will deliver safer patient transfer and improved integrated care across different care settings
- Safer dressings, tubing, syringes, infusion pumps, heart valves, surgical instruments, resuscitators, radiotherapy machines, walking frames or other assistive technology products
- Technologies to eliminate the risk of so-called ‘never events’ and that prevent sepsis, pressure ulcers and infections in care settings
- Smarter patient monitoring (continuous and remote, in real time) to improve patient outcomes, including response to deterioration
- Medications safety.
What are we Looking for?
Idea or Problem Owners (Innovators)
We are aiming to engage 6-10 individuals/teams from NHS organisations in the region to participate in each of our events. We are looking for Idea Owners with innovations in the broad area of medical technology (devices, diagnostics, software and eHealth) that meet unmet clinical needs. Such innovations will be primarily based upon NHS intellectual property (IP) that show the potential to create new company opportunities within the East of England. Problem Owners who don’t yet have a solution for their unmet need are also welcome.
Support Actors
Some of the Idea or Problem Owners may be from purely clinical backgrounds with no substantial experience of product design or hardware/software development, so they may need assistance in developing their idea and guidance in assessing the market opportunity, identifying the best development approach, selecting other delivery partners, quantifying the development costs and subsequent funding/investment needs and developing a sound commercialisation strategy. As such, we will be seeking to recruit the following participants:
- Clinical stakeholders, subject-matter experts and other NHS staff
- Software/hardware developers
- Academics/researchers
- Regulatory experts/consultants
- Business/marketing/strategy consultants
What Will Happen at the Event?
Idea Owners will pitch their ideas or challenge areas, on the day, to an audience of support actors (designers, hardware/software developers and product development engineers along with business and marketing specialists). They will then form into teams in order to ‘workshop’ the ideas into a more complete proposal, which they will then pitch to a panel of judges. The Idea Owners will need to provide clinical/strategic/operational guidance during this process in order to ensure that the proposed solution addresses the problem identified and meets the twin challenges of improving quality and reducing cost.
Expected Outcomes
The judges will pick one or more of the ideas to go forward and pitch their idea to the Medtech Accelerator Investment Panel, with a chance of winning up to £125,000 of funding to develop the idea. The remaining projects will all be offered the opportunity of further mentoring and support from HEE & the EAHSN.
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