Alder Hey @Nywhere Launches Children’s Hybrid Hospital Of The Future

LIVERPOOL, UK, June 10, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ — ALDER HEY LAUNCHES GROUND-BREAKING HYBRID DIGITAL HEALTH PLATFORM IN COLLABORATION WITH MICROSOFT AND MINDWAVE

“TODAY’S CHILD, TOMORROW’S HEALTHIER ADULT”

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, one of the world’s leading paediatric healthcare institutions, has today launched a ground-breaking digital platform that is set to revolutionise the way in which patient care is delivered to children and young people.

The hybrid health platform AlderHey@nywhere is being championed as a “hospital of the future”, where patient and clinical care is delivered in a hybrid world, both physical and virtual, to create a “hospital without walls”. The interactive and immersive digital platform provides a hybrid point of access and patient care for families, children, young people and clinicians to manage, treat, educate and coordinate delivery of their healthcare. Most importantly, it will focus on preventative healthcare and will make patient care more accessible and personalised.

The technology was developed by Alder Hey Innovation in collaboration with Microsoft and Mindwave as a solution to addressing the finite capacity of hospital and community resources, including both physical space and workforce. This was also paired with an increased demand of accident and emergency admissions, long waiting times for outpatient appointments, and increasing lengths of stay.

Alder Hey has a dedicated innovation centre within the hospital and campus, focused on using cutting-edge technologies and innovations to solve the real-world, day-to-day problems faced by children and young people.

Alder Hey Innovation believes that by leveraging innovative health tech, digital platforms, data and AI, it can revolutionise the way healthcare is delivered to children and young people. It seeks to break down the traditional barriers for patients when accessing care and personal health information, as well as when receiving therapies and seeking education, creating a future of healthcare that is a “hospital without walls” with the focus of care being the individual, taking a more personalised and tailored approach.

Commenting on the launch of the new digital health platform, Managing Director of Alder Hey Innovation, Claire Liddy, said:

“At the moment, healthcare is most often about treating people that are ill. What we want to do is to shift to a more preventative model of care that is individualised and tailored and that empowers children and young people to take ownership of their healthcare and treatment. There are so many different technologies out there now, including wearable technology and devices such as smartwatches that enable you to monitor your health at home. What we needed was a hybrid platform to bring it all together into one place so that families, children and young people could access it, alongside their clinicians at the hospital.

“We think the AlderHey@nywhere platform will allow us to elevate the level and access to care for children and young people who tell us that they want to be empowered to understand and manage their own healthcare and treatment. It also allows us to move to a more preventative healthcare modelling, making healthcare more individual and personalised.”

AlderHey@nywhere is a co-development with Microsoft and tech SME Mindwave. The collaboration came together to co-create a hybrid healthcare platform that will create a way of delivering healthcare for children and young people that is far more tailored to the individual, giving them better life chances.

Claire Liddy added:

“The Innovation Centre at Alder Hey Children’s hospital is a really special and unique place. It’s a dedicated team, all focussed on bringing new technology into healthcare for the benefit of children and young people. We work with a wide range of private sector partners, including tech giants, SMEs, entrepreneurs and universities, to co-invent new technologies and innovations. We have a different mindset and culture of innovation; we are able to move fast and think big, which allows our innovation path to accelerate much faster than the traditional pathways. We are able to fuse healthcare and tech innovation with industry. This fusion brings something special and unique, creating faster-paced technologies.”

AlderHey@nywhere provides a unique digital platform that is designed with children young people and their families in mind, making it visually aesthetic, engaging and immersive, but also intuitive. At the same time, its dual purpose is engineered for clinicians to monitor, assess and optimise data and clinical workflow in the management and delivery of patient care.

Mindwave – which has previously worked with Alder Hey to develop other tech platforms, including AlderPlay and mental health platform CYP As One – have been the lead developers on the visual interface of the portal, as well as the interconnectivity and operability of data.

Founder and CEO, Kumar Jacob, said:

“It has been a privilege to work with Alder Hey Innovation Centre and Microsoft to be responsible for the design and development of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of AlderHey@nywhere. Our role has been to ensure that the portal is visually appealing and immersive, making sure the experience that young people, children and their families have is engaging, enjoyable, simple-to-use and easy-to-understand. At the same time, we want the complicated data and AI to flow seamlessly to ensure that the data flow of information is interoperable and sent across multiple devices, making the experience seamless, functional and easy for clinicians to use.”

AlderHey@nywhere enables the interoperability of multiple systems using FHIR, remote devices and resources for management of acute and chronic conditions. Furthermore, it collates a new unique data set for longer-term, AI-augmented decision-making for preventative intervention, personalised care and long-term disease prevention.

Umang Patel, Chief Clinical Information Officer at Microsoft, also offers a unique perspective thanks to his dual role at Microsoft and as a paediatrician working in the NHS at Frimley Park Hospital.

“It’s been a real privilege to work with Alder Hey to develop the AlderHey @nywhere platform,” he says. “Microsoft always loves projects that gets its staff excited – to be given the opportunity to help children and young people – was one such project. Hopefully we have been able to bring some new insights, skills and innovations that will help Alder Hey not only solve problems locally but scale beyond the Liverpool region. What they have done at Alder Hey is great for many reasons, but two stand out: first, the Alder Hey team has managed to keep it simple. If you ask 100 doctors what they want in an ideal system, they will tell you a million important things. The team has managed to scale that back, kept it usable, and brought the most important things to the front. Second, is the momentum they have generated- it’s trailblazing innovation at its best.”

AlderHey@nywhere was based around a model of prevention and intervention. The digital health platform allows for:

A true hybrid of both physical and virtual patient care

Remote real-time monitoring of patient care for intervention

Creating a platform of care that is tailored and self-managed

Digital Bio-markers and IoMT for preventive real time augmented clinical decision making

Children and young people want to be empowered to engaged interactively with gamification to understand and manage their care

To watch our short film on AlderHey @nywhere and learn more about our work please go to

https://www.alderheyinnovation.com/alderheyanywhere

ENDS

Available for media interviews upon request

Claire Liddy MD AlderHey Innovation
Adam Bateman Chief Operating Officer AlderHey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust

ABOUT US

ABOUT ALDER HEY INNOVATION CENTRE – Todays Child, Tomorrows Healthier Adult

Alder Hey Innovation is the largest, dedicated, purpose built, hospital led innovation centre in the UK. Alder Hey Children’s NHS Trust has a proud history of innovation spanning over a hundred years.

Today we continue that legacy pioneering the use of cutting-edge technology and innovating to save lives and improve the life chances of today’s child. Our ambition is to be the world leader in advancing child health with innovation, utilising our unique hospital-based innovation centre, disrupting, discovering and disseminating to have real impact.

Our mission is to solve the real-world healthcare problems children and young people face today, creating fair access to care and enabling a healthier future for all.

Our unique strengths lie in our experience to innovate and disrupt, with a strong track record of rapid problem solving, creating an end-to-end pipeline and process from problem identification and solutions through to commercial income.

Our strategy is fueled by a bespoke open innovation system, to rapidly identify real-world problems and bring the right partners together to solve those with innovative and disruptive technology. Our co creation approach involves scouting and partnering with local and international industry and academia, bringing the most innovative technology and solutions to Alder Hey, where we strive for excellence and breakthroughs in healthcare.

www.alderheyinnovation.com

ABOUT ALDER HEY

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust provides care for over 330,000 children and young people every year. Alder Hey delivers clinical excellence for all children, for routine illnesses as well as very complex and rare conditions.

One of four stand-alone children’s hospitals in the UK, it is a national centre for neuro and craniofacial surgery, a regional centre for burns injuries and a Centre of Excellence for children with cancer, heart, spinal and brain disease. Alder Hey as an NIHR funded Clinical Research Facility (CRF) that specialises in the design, and delivery, of early phase drug trials in children with a wide range of conditions.

The Trust is one of only four epilepsy surgical centres in the UK and one of only two accredited major trauma centres in the North West. Alder Hey is also a respiratory Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) surge centre and is the referral centre for the treatment of congenital heart defects in North West England, North Wales and Isle of Man. It became the first UK Centre of Excellence for Childhood Lupus in 2010.

Alder Hey is the first accredited Investing in Children hospital in the UK. It has a dedicated patient experience programme which includes the award-winning Alder Hey Arts involving music therapy, dance programmes, storytelling and animation projects. It is also one of a few hospitals to have a Children and Young Person’s Forum.

Alder Hey opened a new hospital ‘Alder Hey in the Park’ in 2015. Europe’s first hospital in a park, the new facility provides a purpose-built, unique and world class healing environment for children and young people.

Alder Hey is supported by The Alder Hey Children’s Charity which aims to raise vital funds for lifesaving equipment, research projects and patient experience initiatives.

For more information visit www.alderhey.nhs.uk and www.alderheycharity.org

ABOUT MINDWAVE

Mindwave (Mindwave Ventures Limited) designs and develops digital applications for healthcare .

Mindwave works with NHS organisations, charities and universities to help them develop innovative digital products to deliver healthcare and carry out health research. Mindwave’s patient portal is currently deployed in over eight organisations.

The company has grown to around 95 staff based in the UK and Pondicherry (South India). Mindwave’s designers based in the UK are steeped in user centred design. Design and development follows Government Digital Service (GDS) guidelines and Agile principles.

Born out of the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), Mindwave was founded in 2014; the brain-child of Kumar Jacob MBE, who trained as an accountant and then operated in different guises across a broad range of sectors, including charity, education, health and technology.

Having worked with creative teams that brought out hugely popular video games such as Burnout , Singstar, WipeOut at Criterion and Sony, whilst also serving as a non-exec director at SLaM and as the chair at the Maudsley Charity, Kumar could see a disparity between the way that the public sector and the technology sector were solving problems.

Enter Mindwave. Over the years, the team has grown from a handful of designers to a full-service provider, supplying expert health design and technology consultancy alongside end-to-end digital service development. To date, Mindwave has worked with a wide range of health-focused organisations, including multiple NHS trusts and ICS regions, health-focused charities, and a large number of clinical academic teams.

Mindwave also works with and supports a number of health-tech startups, providing consultancy, design, development and project management to support peers to successfully enter the market.

Mindwave is known for going above and beyond, and for the team’s eagerness to help, converse and collaborate.

www.mindwaveventures.com

Gerard Franklin
i5 Media
[email protected]