A health tech supplier based in Norway has launched a pilot scheme with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to explore the company’s online knowledge and decision support systems.
VAR Healthcare has joined the Innovation Pop Up at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, with the aim to enter the NHS tech market in England.
Widely used across Norway, the tech is said to “provide nurses and healthcare professionals with an easy-to-use digital tool to quickly access details of hundreds of clinical procedures to support safe and continuous patient care.”
The company is to start a pilot at Leeds Teaching to gain feedback on the technology, language, terms and content – with an aim to adopt the solution for the NHS.
As part of the Innovation Pop Up at Leeds, the company will have access to clinical teams and will be provided with business support and resources.
The tech itself provides a search engine with knowledge and decision support from a database of 450 regularly updated, evidence-based procedures, including “helpful summaries, rich illustrations and animations, knowledge tests and calculators”.
Ann Kristin Rotegård PhD, Managing Director, said: “We have ambitions to spread out further and share best practice to support all nurses so they can give the best possible patient care. In old Norse mythology, Var was the goddess of wisdom – a good name for our evidence-based tool which contributes to wise and visible frontline staff. We have a wonderful collaboration with the Innovation Pop Up in Leeds which is opening doors for us in the UK. In the future, we would like to open a UK office and create jobs for experienced local nurses to help us grow further.”
“We are delighted to be helping VAR Healthcare build a presence in the UK,” added Professor David Brettle, Chief Scientific Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and founder of the Innovation Pop Up. “Leeds represents one of Europe’s largest medical, academic and industrial establishments and has a supportive ecosystem for health tech companies like VAR Healthcare. It is the ideal environment for scaling up innovations in healthcare.”
The Innovation Pop Up was launched September 2021, and has so far worked with 150 companies and identified 30 collaborations and ten funding opportunities.
