In a week where Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust has signed a £10 million deal with Civica, and the NHS Cancer Programme announced a new funding competition for innovations, there have plenty of great stories from the health tech sector.
Here are a few more news bites and announcements that have caught our eye…
Share2Care hits 1,000 users in a day
Share2Care, a collaborative programme between the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership and Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria has reached 1,000 hits in a day.
This platform provides clinicians from across different organisations in Cheshire & Merseyside access to patient information.
Bradford sees £100k savings with digital letters
Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has announced some data following the introduction of digital patient letters six months ago.
The trust said that the solution implemented had exceeded expectations, and now 66% of patients view their letters online. They also noted that the project has resulted in savings greater than £100k.
Connecting Care
Jocelyn Palmer, Connecting Care programme lead, is to join NHSX to work on shared care records and interoperability.
In June 2020, Jocelyn shared with HTN how the Connecting Care shared care record supported the response to COVID-19 in and around Bristol.
BBSTEM Bridge Mentoring Scheme ready to pair students with professionals
The Black British Professionals in STEM (BBSTEM) Bridge Mentoring Scheme is now open to applications for its April 2021 cohort. The Medical Research Council-sponsored voluntary scheme links up Black British STEM students with STEM professionals. It provides the opportunity for mentors to share experiences, tips, support, guidance and career insights through email, phone calls or video chats, while students can ask for advice and use the scheme to help them prepare for life after university.
Each cohort runs for six months, with the expectation that mentors undergo a training webinar and meet with mentees at least once per month. If interested in becoming a mentor or mentee in the March intake, you must sign up to become a member.
Suffrage Science Podcast to launch on International Women’s Day
The new Suffrage Science Podcast is set to launch on 8 March 2021, the date of International Women’s Day.
The podcast, hosted by Dr Kat Arney, will cover how women are changing science, as well as progress and challenges related to the journeys of women in science. Content is set to include conversations with scientific leaders and Suffrage Science award winners from the past decade.
Produced by First Create The Media, audio production is by Georgia Mills for the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences Suffrage Science scheme. As well as listening to the launch on the day, you can subscribe in advance via Podbean, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Bristol University creates new patient monitoring system to help staff in ICU
University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust partnered with Bristol University to create a new data monitoring system to help staff working in intensive care.
The system, a clinical data dashboard, has been in use across the trust for the past six months. The data dashboard enables clinical staff to use visual graphics to monitor patients alongside trends. Monitoring patient data collates data from existing clinical information systems and presents it in an accessible form, allowing clinicians to view details as required, whether taking an overview of all patients across multiple wards, or filtering results per ward or physiological parameter, through to detailed views of individual patients.
On the back of the success of the new system, the University of Bristol has committed new research funding, in the shape of a new award named the ‘Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award’.
Dr McWilliams, from the Department of Engineering Mathematics, said: “We will be using a similar software architecture to deliver algorithmic decision support to clinicians at the point of care. What we have learned during this COVID-19 response project will inform at lot of that work.”
Quinten launches global, integrated analytical services and tools development
AI tech company Quinten has now launched Quinten Health, a global and integrated analytical services and tools development offer.
The Quinten Health team are currently working in areas such as precision oncology solutions, universal and RGPD-compliant hospital data networks and NLP-based medical literature analysis.
The suite of technologies will enable:
- earlier and better diagnosis of rare diseases
- drug responders profiling
- weak safety signals identification
- optimal and precision treatment pathways
- augmenting medical decisions at the point of care.
Dr Alexandre Templier, President and Co-founder of the Quinten group, said: “While healthcare has been the major focus for Quinten so far, it was time to gear up and specialise as a genuine HealthTech company, serving and promoting synergies between drug developers, care providers and public health decision makers through artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions developed with and for them.”
