INSIGHTS / Blog

SETsquared will be attending the NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo on 4 & 5 September in Manchester. The biggest NHS-led event of the year, it attracts an audience of 5,000+, uniting people from right across the health and social care sector.

Our reason for attending.

Simple.

We’ll be bringing together ambitious, scaling health companies with prominent academics with health-related expertise from our scale-up partner universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, to ignite collaborations to develop innovative new products and services that will keep us active and independent for longer.

The proportion of people over 75 in the UK today is one in 12. By 2040, it will rise to one in 7. We’re also living for longer and a third of children born now are expected to live to 100. It’s reported that the NHS spends more than 55% of budget on care of the elderly and this population is predicted to grow to 18.5 million people in 2025.

Whilst this presents a challenge to health services, it is also an opportunity for businesses and researchers who can help people to stay active and productive as they age.

New technology will have a huge role to play and in the last five years we’ve already seen a huge influx of products which enable us to take more responsibility for our own health from wearables to apps which help us monitor our lifestyles including calorie and alcohol intake. And this shift to a preventative approach to our health will only continue apace.

Here are some current examples of innovative companies that are being supported by our Scale-Up Programme  which will collaborate with academia to develop vital health innovations of the future.

Brain in Hand is a market-ready digital support system that helps people withdevelopmental and mental health difficulties live more independently. It is currently in use in 25% of local authorities and 80% of universities in England.

With academic expertise from the University of Exeter, Brain in Hand is focussed on securing the independent, high-quality evaluation needed to meet the NHS standards for research, thus attaining the credibility needed to win NHS contracts and address the considerable unmet need in the general population.

Docobo  has been developing and installing telehealth solutions since 2001, in the UK and Internationally, offering a range of Digital Health solutions to enable community care and independent living. In 2015 they launched Artemus™, a cloud-based population health intelligence tool designed to support clinical commissioning and operation care decisions by providing insights into cross-sector data, now in use with Surrey Heartlands ICS and multiple CCG’s.

Building on the rich data sets held within Artemus, they have started to incorporate Machine Learning capability to the solution, enabling Docobo to provide significantly enhanced intelligence, giving health services greater predictive insights, leading to more proactive rather than reactive services. They will be utilising expertise from the University of Surrey to do this.

What these examples really highlight is that injecting academic expertise will take these companies to the next level of growth and result in some much-needed new innovations which will ease the burden on our health services of our ageing population.

This benefits us all in the long run, as let’s face it none of us are getting any younger!

If you’re attending the NHS Expo, come and visit us on stand 235. If you’re a health business there will be opportunities to meet the academics in attendance, so you can understand how their expertise could feed the innovation of your business.

We’re also speaking on the main stage on at 11.15am on 4^th September on: Disrupting Demography: Translating health ageing research into scalable, world-class business – so be sure to catch us there.