DigitalHealth.London Insider

The Week – 20th – 24th June,

What a week! At the time of writing this we’ve seen two exits from the ‘Euro’ in the last 5 days. First Brexit and now the dismal departure of the England football team from Euro 2016.

First up London Tech Week – in particular ‘How to be successful with the NHS?’ @LDNTechWeek DigitalHealth.London together with Medcity, TechLondonAdvocates sponsored a stimulating 360 panel debate looking at the business models required for digital health innovators to access the NHS. The 3 panels were NHS, digital innovators, and big corporates, providing a rare opportunity to hear the 3 perspectives side by side. The NHS panel was expertly hosted by Sarah Haywood, CEO at Medcity, and included Mike Part – NHSE, Anna King – DH.L, Ifan Evan – Welsh Government, Jenny Shand – Care City, Dr Lloyd Humphrey’s – Patient’s Know Best, and Martin Hunt – NIHR. A special, and much appreciated appearance was made by Andrew Lansley, CBE who was in the audience. We’re grateful to Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates, for his closing address speaking about the “collision of cultures” that currently plagues the digital health space, but which can be overcome with collaborative effort.

Axel Heitmueller and I had an interesting discussion with Dave Chase, Seattle based Investor & Entrepreneur, about his recent opine piece about challenging how “Digital Health Startups are Zombies”. He writes for Forbes.com. I spoke to another of our digital health colleagues from across the pond – Ranked Health, about their platform for evaluating health apps and devices. There appears to be quite a lot of activity growing in this space. Long awaited guidance is required to support innovators in having a clearer idea of what’s expected of them in order to get their technologies credited. Equally ‘buyers’ increasingly will need reassurances around the digital solutions that they may wish to consider for commissioning and to be accepted onto any future technology tariffs.

The rest of my week was spent amongst other things, slowly moving forward some of the opportunities we are scoping with our NHS stakeholders. In particular exploring how DH.L we can add value to the CIO and CCIO community, and also how we support the Healthy London Partnership Identity Management Programme and API standards programme. Stay tuned.

Yinka Makinde

@YMakinde1