The East Midlands Digital Health Accelerator is a support programme for a small number of Digital Health innovators who we believe have an exciting and worthwhile innovation that can make a real difference to our health and care system.

We selected three companies for our 2019-20 cohort who over the next year will receive support from EMAHSN experts to support the development of their businesses and innovations.

Here, Lucy Champ Business Development Director at WoundWorks, one of our Accelerator companies, talks about their adoption and spread journey and why they applied to the Digital Health Accelerator programme. 

 WoundWorks and our innovation

Our product inSight enables accurate, consistent wound assessments and supports clinical decision making across all wound areas. inSight does this by combining precise 3D camera technology with software to transform a tablet or mobile device into an indispensable, accurate, consistent and intuitive digital wound assessment and documentation system.  Data is compounded to present a cumulative picture of healing. Secure, cloud-based data storage means data can be viewed by colleagues on any internet-enabled device immediately, facilitating a virtual multidisciplinary team. Patients can provide wound assessment information remotely, reducing the need for face-to-face interaction with a healthcare professional. This facilitates pathway re-design and unlocks the potential for efficiency savings.

Wound care has become an area of great focus for the NHS. The Lord Carter Review highlighted that the care of wounds, specifically in the community setting is unnecessarily varied. A spend of around £5 billon each year on wound management is vast. The National Wound Care Strategy (NWCS) programme has been established to attempt to implement actions to remedy some of the issues wound care faces. Wound assessment and access to specialist services/clinicians are two well publicised issues which inSight can address. 

East Midlands Digital Health Accelerator and WoundWorks

We initially connected with the East Midlands AHSN through an NHS readiness event and we were impressed with the knowledge and the expertise shown. We saw the Accelerator programme as a great opportunity to strengthen our UK proposition and align with the NHS at this pivotal time in the history of NHS wound care and we felt our offering and our future offering could really make a positive impact on the health and care system.

The East Midlands AHSN has a good reputation for being able to test, spread and drive innovations in the markets related to ours so working with them was a goal we had from very early in our UK journey. We applied to the scheme for an opportunity to receive expert one-to-one advice sessions, support with funding applications, further opportunities to meet NHS stakeholders and a platform to showcase our innovations to a relevant audience.

We hope that being part of the DHA will enable us to generate the right platform for us to scale and spread our technology. We hope to accelerate our progress around many areas from evidence generation, real world evaluation through to our value proposition and business cases resulting in a clear tested scalable concept.

So far, the assistance with launching new technology that we’ve had as part of the programme has been great. We have just launching our new Smartphone offering and the ideas and support we have accessed has been fantastic.

Our experience of navigating the NHS so far

As healthcare innovators looking at the system from the outside in, we’ve seen and come across some barriers when trying to spread our innovation. These include:

• In some instances, a lack of appetite for change
• Difficulties knowing which stakeholders to contact. Sometimes there are almost too many stakeholders and not clear template for who to go to in an organisation and then where within that organisation this type of product needs to be driven to get purchased and implemented
• Changing rules and regulations with digital requirements
• Pilots and the logistics around setting up a full pilot! Everyone wants to try the system, but to really see true benefit requires a full launch involving all elements of the care pathway.
• In relation to pilots, another connected barrier is baseline data – many organisations don’t collect data currently on some of the things we can potentially influence, although they acknowledge these as problem areas

We know that the above barriers are common problems and it is great to have the East Midlands AHSN as a soundboard as part of our Digital Health Accelerator involvement.

Recent highlights for WoundWorks

We’ve had some exciting recent highlights:

• New product launch – diversifying our product for even more devices and making it more accessible
• Successful rollouts in a number of organisations within the South East of England NHS East of England Collaborative procurement hub framework award
• We’ve been highlighted in a number of articles including Wound Care Today and the Journal of Community Nursing.

We look forward to adding to these highlights over the next year accelerating the adoption and spread of our product to help more patients in the East Midlands.

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Nick Brown – Commercial Manager at East Midlands AHSN says “WoundWorks were an obvious fit for us for our East Midlands Digital Health Accelerator. We selected them for several reasons, firstly, their product answers a prominent issue within the health and care system and has the potential to create some substantial efficiencies. They have made some great progress with adoption and spread in other regions and the results and impacts speak for themselves. The barriers that they have outlined are areas that we feel our expertise will help them navigate, so we are sure that it will be a beneficial partnership for WoundWorks and our East Midlands health and care system.”

Author 

Lucy Champ Business Development Director at WoundWorks