Swansea University, with the support of local health boards and Swansea Bay City Deal, has launched The National Network for Innovation In Sport and Health (NNIISH) as part of efforts to accelerate the growth of med tech, healthcare innovation and sport tech in the region.
A key focus of the new initiative is support collaborative work between the NHS, industry and academia, with the university sharing hopes that the existence of NNIISH can strengthen existing collaborations, bring new partnerships to life, and encourage investment in this space.
NNIISH describes itself as “fostering an ideal environment for innovation and growth” and adds that its overarching aim is to establish a diverse community of stakeholders including local SMEs, startups and multinational corporations to “create a vibrant ecosystem where entrepreneurs and industry leaders collaborate, share insights, and catalyse change”.
So far, projects undertaken by the network have explored topics such as how technology can support lung transplants by directly oxygenating blood to augment residual lung capacity; how medical teams can be supported to collect and use patient data in an efficient manner; and how AI analysis can be deployed to support early-stage cancer detection. NNIISH also highlights opportunities such as a fully-funded PhD scholarship at Swansea University aiming to examine how 5G technology and wearables could improve health and wellbeing for older adults, and a scholarship researching the effectiveness of virtual reality exposure therapy to treat gambling disorder.
Local professionals working within healthcare, med tech or sports tech with an interest in taking part are encouraged to get in touch, and more information on the hub can be found here.
Wales: the wider trend
At the start of July, we looked into the organisational strategy for 2024-2030 from Digital Health and Care Wales, including planned actions such as moving all data stores and services to a National Data Resource platform in order to create a single national clinical data repository. Click here to read more.
In spring, we shared the news that Digital Health and Care Wales was to implement a health information system and electronic medical record as a fully hosted and managed platform across nine health boards, 13 hospitals and 23 laboratories in Wales.
Earlier in the year we reported on the news that Promptly Health secured an £11 million three-year contract to manage national patient-centred outcomes data for NHS Wales; and we highlighted the first annual review from the Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio, which marks progress on “one of the biggest changes to medicines prescribing, dispensing and administration in decades” for Wales.
