New digital health summit for Manchester announced at MediaCityUK

As Greater Manchester starts to enjoy more devolved powers to develop and deliver health and social care to residents, The Landing has announced details of a new two-day national digital health summit to be held at its MediaCityUK base on May 24th-25^th.

Entitled Delivering the promise of digital health, and funded by the European Regional Development Programme, the event is primarily aimed at technology SMEs and health professionals interested in health tech. One of its key themes will be how the promise and potential of digital health solutions to help tackle major health and wellbeing issues – in both the UK and globally – can struggle to be realised due to a range of challenges and barriers.

These include issues around effectively engaging patients and non-patients positively in the development and delivery of more technology-based health services and treatments; successfully scaling-up digitally-driven pilot schemes and trials to be both effective in terms of wide-scale adoption and commercially sustainability; and how to collate and evaluate robust outcomes data to make the case for more investment in digital health research, and the roll-out of live services.

Keynote health practitioners and policy-makers speaking at the event will include:

• Stephen Dobson, Chief Digital Officer, Greater Manchester Health & Social Care Partnership
• Chris Day, Director of Engagement, Care Quality Commission
• Sarah Thew, Innovation and User Experience Manager, Greater Manchester Academic Health Science Network (GM AHSN)
• Dr Sunil Bhudia, Cardiothoracic Surgeon, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Lloyd Humphreys, VP Business Development, Patients Know Best
• Paul Clitheroe, Digital Care & Innovation, Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group
• Mark Duman, Non-Executive Director, Patient Information Forum

These will be joined by number of international tech and investment experts who specialise in digital health business funding. These will include Savvas Neophytou, Partner, Head of Life Science, Deepbridge Capital LLP, and Robert Higginson, Co-Founder & Partner, Par Equity.

Also taking part in Delivering the promise of digital health will be some of the UK’s leading health technology innovators. These will include Artificial Intelligence (AI) specialists from Google, members of IBM’s health diagnostic image team, and designers of surgical robots from the University of Warwick.

Some of the UK’s leading practitioners of Virtual Reality (VR) and Internet of Things (IoT) technology within healthcare will also be presenting papers and participating in discussion panels.

Jon Corner, Chief Executive of The Landing, said: “My vision is for The Landing to be a leading digital health hub for the North West and beyond, and we are already home to the PwC Future of Health accelerator.

“We have also invested substantially in AI, VR, user experience and IoT facilities which are specifically calibrated towards health tech and digital wellbeing products and services, and we recently installed some revolutionary 3D-printing technology in our maker space which can reproduce CT scans of bone fractures which mean surgeons to make crucial decisions before they pick up a scalpel.”

“I’m therefore very proud that we have been given the chance to host and facilitate this conference centered around the challenges and opportunities offered by digital health and medical technology. This incredible line-up of speakers and delegates will explore not only the massive potential that technology offers us, in terms of both clinical and preventive care, but also look at how we get the technology out of the lab and into our hospitals, GP surgeries and homes.

Sarah Thew, Innovation and User Experience Manager for the Greater Manchester Academic Health Science network (GM AHSN), who are delivering the Greater Manchester DataWell project, an innovative digital infrastructure enabling doctors and care professionals to share and view patient data, said: “With so much great work going on around Greater Manchester in driving innovation and technology is areas such as healthcare, it’s fitting that this national summit is being hosted at The Landing in the heart of MediaCityUK.

“I’m really looking forward to sharing our experiences and insights with other practitioners, designers and technologists in looking at best practice in successfully embedding health technology into our everyday lives safely, ethically and economically, with two days of debate, discussion and collaboration between leading experts within the digital health sector.”

Tickets to Delivering the promise of digital health are free but limited. For more details, or to register, visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/delivering-the-promise-of-digital-health-tickets-33581693750