Our Offer

As the innovation arm of the NHS, our mission is to support the development of transformational health innovations and accelerate the adoption and spread of improvement solutions demonstrated to deliver patient benefit.

Formerly known as the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network over the last decade we have supported hundreds of NHS and health and care organisations to adopt technologies and pathways that respond to local health priorities.

We bring partners together across all sectors involved in healthcare including the NHS, social care and public health, research and industry to support the development and adoption of innovations for patient benefit and promote innovation opportunities to improve health outcomes locally, regionally and globally.

Explore our support services and expertise below, and join us in our purpose: To transform health and care through innovation.

How Can We Help You?

Health and Care Systems

At Health Innovation West Midlands, we work with colleagues from within Health and Social Care to develop a pipeline of evidence–based innovations, providing advice and bespoke support at every stage of the innovation pathway to facilitate the development of innovations.

We act as an ‘honest broker’, facilitating relationships and matching proven innovations to NHS challenges.

We support the adoption and spread of proven evidence-based innovations, facilitate the roll out of national innovation programmes and where required support the development of local programmes with real world evaluation for scaling to regional and national programmes. 

We provide specialist support to enable: 

  • The uptake of innovative technologies and new ways of working, including piloting at demonstrator sites   
  • Evaluation and rapid review of evidence  
  • The rapid uptake of medicines 
  • Data identification & analysis, including indices of multiple deprivation aligning to NHS England’s Core20PLUS5  
  • Quality Improvement​ (QI) 
  • The delivery of the National Patient Safety Strategy  
  • Improvements in relation to national patient safety priorities including not limited to: Patient Safety Incident Response Form (PSIRF), Managing Deterioration, Medicines Safety, Maternity and Neonatal, and Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism  
  • Collaboration across innovators, industry, researchers, and the NHS to facilitate a whole-systems approach 

Our team have expertise in: 

  • Human Factors & Ergonomics  
  • Appreciative Inquiry 
  • Quality improvement  
  • Leading through convening through the establishment of networks, Communities of Practices, and collaboratives 
  • Brokering relationships with others that have adopted innovations within their systems, sharing best practice 
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Innovators 

Health Innovation West Midlands works with local health systems to understand areas of clinical and system need. These needs are then shared with innovators and partners through our innovation exchange to provide advice and support throughout the discovery and development of solutions. 

 In our role of as an innovation exchange, we:- 

  • Work with systems and local partners to identify unmet needs and opportunities to help innovators understand the local healthcare challenges. 
  • Act as a point of access for the West Midlands innovation ecosystem, signposting and supporting innovators enabling access to NHS services. 
  • Broker regional partnerships with commissioners and providers to enable evaluation and testing of innovations. 
  • Support the scaling and spread of innovations from local to regional and regional to national adoption. 

 

 

Health and Social Care Entrepreneur Academy 

A coordinated programme of activities to support health and social care innovators across the region. 

NHS Intellectual Property (IP) Service 

On behalf of the HIWM, MidTECH Innovations offer intellectual property (IP) management, IP exploitation, strategy, policy and process advice, IP awareness and training, access to specialist services and networks, such as patent attorneys, solicitors, design development and prototyping, and assistance with funding bids and project management.   

Industry Gateway 

Providing a single-point for all commercial and industrial enquiries providing access to expertise and support, our Industry Gateway actively seek opportunities for collaboration, co-production and economic growth within the region.  

Incubator and Accelerator Programme 

A hybrid support service designed to support and accelerate the growth of start-ups that are passionate about addressing the challenges faced by the health and social care economy. 

Horizon Scanning 

A Horizon Scan is systematically identifying innovations that meet a defined need or challenge. This involves the production of a list of health and care innovations, to support our health and care partners in understanding the technologies available to meet their challenges following two key principles: 

  1. Making use of knowledge of strategic partners 
  1. Identifying innovations with high potential to have positive patient and/or staff impact

Our team have expertise in: 

  • Intellectual property management 
  • Identifying funding sources, partner organisations and bid writing 
  • Human Factors 
  • Brokering relationships across industry, NHS, academic and community stakeholders to resolve clinical and service challenges 
  • Commercialisation  
  • Regulatory  
  • Innovation management  
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Researchers

At Health Innovation West Midlands, we pride ourselves on ensuring that our innovation pipeline of new and transformative products and services are evidence-based as well as co-produced in consultation and collaboration with patients and the public. 

We work closely with academia and research institutions, as well as industry and NHS providers connecting researchers with innovators and vice versa to inform your research and translate it into clinical practice. This community of evidence generation helps provide real-world evidence for new innovations as well as the opportunity to practically apply your research. By working with our regional networks, we can drive change locally and spread it nationally.   

We provide specialist support to enable: 

  • Unique experience and knowledge of research and implementation into the NHS and social care 
  • opportunities to collaborate with industry, health and social care providers and the community  
  • utilisation of our online innovation exchange to support a collaborative approach to translating research into clinical practice 
  • opportunities to link with local partners: NIHR Applied Research Centre (ARC) WM, Midlands Patient Safety Collaboratives, WM Clinical Research Network (WM Research Delivery Network) 

Our team have expertise in: 

  • Evidence synthesis 
  • Evaluation and Real World validation 
  • Human Factors & Ergonomics 
  • Grant/bid development and writing 
  • Networking including the setup of Communities of Practices, networks and collaboratives 
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