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Amaka Ojiako, EMRAD/HIEM Innovation Lead tells us about her first year in the role, all that has been achieved and plans for the future.
The joint innovation lead roles began in 2023. Health Innovation East Midlands has offered two years of funding for the roles to each ICS and to the East Midlands Imaging Network (EMRAD) and the Mental Health Alliance for the East Midlands. The new roles will work jointly with HIEM and with their lead organisation to support the delivery of the innovation plans, navigate multiple sources of innovation to look out for opportunities, review innovations and facilitate adoption and spread.
Time has really flown since I started a year ago as the first Innovation Lead role hosted by Health Innovation East Midlands (HIEM) with the East Midlands Imaging Network (EMRAD). Writing this blog has made me grateful that I exercised the gift of pausing and thoughtful reflection, because it has helped me to appreciate my journey, the milestones achieved, and the endless opportunities ahead.
In my role, I am hosted by EMRAD and also report to HIEM; both organisations with different objectives, but a common goal of driving timely innovation to patients in the East Midlands.
My core HIEM objective is to work with stakeholders across EMRAD to discover, develop, deploy and sustain imaging-focused innovations.
For EMRAD, my mandate is to support the efforts to develop and implement a single point entry for more consistent and sustainable adoption of imaging innovations that are fit-for-purpose and beneficial to patients. Furthermore, I have been responsible for localising the Secure Data Environment (SDE), a national programme that is set to shift the way data is obtained for research and innovation from sharing to access.
To provide some context, EMRAD is the most mature imaging network in the country comprising eight Partner Trusts and is renowned for pioneering the disruption of image-sharing. Within the first months in my role, it became clear that EMRAD was experiencing an innovation overload caused by a fragmented approach to deploying and adopting innovation amongst several other factors.
Furthermore, EMRAD is sought after by researchers and innovators seeking to develop, test, and validate their innovations with robust and diverse imaging data. Ultimately, the result is a supplier-driven lens to innovation adoption that lacks a well-defined framework and use cases to identify financially, technically, and functionally feasible innovation solutions.
In response to the challenges and opportunities, EMRAD’s goal is to become a single point entry for imaging innovation across the network. To achieve this, my role has involved providing a streamlined process and a strategy for deploying and adopting responsible innovations while contributing to the co-designing process for yet to be developed innovations that meet an apparent need. In a space of one year, these are some milestones I have achieved;
The SDE programme is part of the national policy direction to foster health tech innovation in England through data storage and access platforms that address the drawbacks of data sharing (privacy concerns, duplicative processes, and difficulty with linking data). In line with the efforts to make SDEs the default route for accessing NHS Data for research and external uses, I led a proof of concept (POC) at EMRAD that assessed the viability, feasibility and sustainability of building a Secure Data Environment to enable researchers and innovators to access imaging data if they meet governance and other requirements.
Some of the POC’s offshoot include data quality improvement and standardisation, patient and public involvement, as well as more uniform governance to reduce duplicative processes that frustrate research and innovation. At a time when Artificial Intelligence and other health innovations are gaining ground in radiology, the value of an SDE is innumerable and possibly game changing.
I am responsible for the Innovation and AI forum, which is a collaborative effort between EMRAD and HIEM that is creating a more uniform, single-point entry for facilitating the adoption of AI solutions that are fit-for-purpose for both clinicians and patients.
The Forum has recorded success and attendance from key stakeholders across the network and has evolved from a platform for just showcasing innovations in the marketplace, to include other activities like agenda setting for innovation across the network.
There has been a significant surge of artificial intelligence applications for diagnostic imaging, with vast opportunities for addressing workforce shortage concerns and improving patient outcomes. EMRAD is an active partner in the efforts to develop and adopt ethical AI for the benefit of our patients and therefore needed a clear strategy to get the best value AI could possibly provide for patients and the imaging workforce. I drafted EMRAD’s AI strategy, which describes a network-level approach to AI deployment that pools expertise, fosters shared learning, and streamlines processes.
EMRAD Partner Trusts are experiencing what can be described as a wild west where they are inundated with innovation projects that are sometimes misaligned with pressing needs and priorities. I have engaged with stakeholders across the 8 Partner Trusts and mapped out their innovation needs, priorities and opportunities to inform a more systematic approach. However, this will be a continuous task to reflect the changing needs of patients and imaging clinical work force.
Furthermore, working with HIEM, I have created an innovation pathway designed to make EMRAD the front door for initial innovation partnership requests and inquiries. This new approach and process has saved Partner Trusts the time and resources expended while engaging with innovations that are not ready for market and provides innovators with the needed support and resources to enhance their innovation’s readiness.
I was actively involved in developing the business case for a major national funding pool that was successful and will enable the live deployment of AI across the network.
I set up this newsletter to disseminate up-to-date information on imaging innovation, share lessons learned from deploying innovation across the network, encourage collaboration and more open communication across the network. (Here is a link to previous editions)
As part of the efforts to streamline the process and serve as a single point entry for innovation in EMRAD, I created the EMRAD Innovation Interest Group with representation from the 8 Partner Trusts, to serve as a focal point for sharing existing innovations, and providing overall support for innovation deployment and adoption.
I created EMRAD’s innovation catalogue which gives Partner Trusts a bird eye view of all the innovations and ongoing innovation projects across EMRAD and their status.
Overall, I am grateful to be in a role where no day is the same and I absolutely love the challenge of working in the evolving space of digital transformation for health!
I am glad that the months of advocacy and stakeholder engagements through the Innovation and AI Forum, one-on-ones with key stakeholders, and Partner Trust meetings are paying off with the shift towards a network-approach to innovation deployment and adoption.
It has been a year of listening, learning, putting the needed structures in place and articulating EMRAD’s vision for innovation.
I look forward to the next months and years of seeing this much needed foundation pay off for EMRAD/HIEM’s partnership and possibly contribute to the national efforts to create a public innovation ecosystem for the deployment and adoption of responsible and ethical health innovations that prioritise our patients’ interest.