The Innovation Pop-Up at the LGI is an area where companies can connect and work collaboratively with the Trust’s clinicians and innovation team, to transform the latest advances in science, research, and technology into real world solutions.
We are already growing a vibrant community of healthtech companies, from start-ups to established international organisations, looking to work with the NHS. We’ve created international trade links with countries including Norway, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and the US.
Whether you have the seed of an idea or an established product, the Innovation Pop Up team would love to hear from you.
LTHT Innovation short film
So, innovation in Leeds It’s one of my passions. Sir Clifford Albert invented the clinical thermometer in the hospital in Leeds. The first application of artificial intelligence in healthcare was done in Leeds in the 1970s. The first hip replacement was built in Leeds just over the road from Lee Shamil Infirmary, but that legacy is something we can build on, and that’s helping to change attitudes and cultures for our new hospitals, so a journey started with the announcement we’re going to have two new hospitals in Leeds and the need to prepare our staff with respect to the new technologies and new ways of working, and that’s the catalyst for the problem.
The Innovation pop-up here at Leeds was established to allow a front door to the NHS for innovation and technology, so it’s an area where companies can come with their craziest wackiest idea and get really curated advice on how to bring that forward. Every member of staff has access to it, and we encourage nurses, physiotherapists, and anyone else to attend. The benefit is very simple for us; it’s around getting the best care for our patients. Getting a new innovation or technology into a healthcare setting safely in an effective way requires a whole infrastructure and a whole team around it to help do that in a smooth and efficient process.
Business development regulatory experts building clinical trials I’ve benefitted from all of these things with the projects that I’ve had, and I think that’s what makes leads an excellent ecosystem system for developing, deploying, and evaluating new technology and innovation in healthcare. One of our projects is looking at patients who’ve had surgery. The question we’re asking is if we put a headset on a patient could they self-direct their own therapy now yeah it feels like a really exciting Innovation, and it feels like the sort of thing that will make a difference to our patients hopefully soon but also for years to come this is the first opportunity that we have as a physiotherapy team to really be involved in the Innovation and the research and the rewards that come along with the patient benefit is completely fulfilling for us.
The role of industry in giving healthcare access to these tools is absolutely paramount. We have a really open collaborative approach to the private sector, that’s really what we’re trying to do both adopting technologies, but also any technology that we have making it available to others so npic is one of a number of innovation products that have been supported in the hospital. We’re using new scanners that allow us to digitize patients biopsies in order to diagnose cancer digitally the piece of tissue that might be one or two centimetres in size can generation absolutely enormous Digital Image If you print them, they can be the size of a tennis court or a squash court, and this technology really does revolutionise how we diagnose cancer.
One of the research products that we’re undertaking with the scanners is that all of the patients were part of the hundred thousand genomes project organised by genomics England, and we’re taking all their slides from 80 hospitals across the country, bringing them to the Olympic Centre, and scanning them to create an enormous resource of pathology images to allow cancer research to be improved. Digital is going to be the future of health, and to have data gives us a data-driven hospital, which gives us efficiencies, so we need our staff to come with us on this journey, and that requires us to give them the skills that they need in a workforce like ours, where we’ve got 22 000 people. We’re really lucky here in Leeds that we’ve got some fantastic universities on our doorstep, and our relationship with them is absolutely critical. I’m a massive fan of innovation. I think it’s the catalyst for driving forward change, and I think once you’ve got that culture of doing it, and you promote that in your colleagues, the kind of things that you can develop are immense.
The success of the pop-up is obviously to help deliver the view of hospitals. I have no doubt at all that in the future the pop-up will pop down, and it will become an innovation centre, and that would be a fantastic success, and we’re actually hoping that we will be able to convert the old medical school, which is available from next year, into an innovation village. The idea that somebody can have a brain tumour brought into the hospital quickly dealt with safely and returned back to their lives is what we fundamentally want to do with a really good quality of life. That’s where technology and innovation can have a real impact.
We’re producing something that’s a revolution in healthcare, but it’s an evolution of the technologies that we’re using. The clinicians who work across this organisation’s minds seem to be constantly thinking about better ways to do the job. There’s a real culture in this organisation of innovation. It’s the new invention; it’s the new technology we weren’t using; it’s talking to companies about what’s coming down the line; it’s hearing about the operation that’s being changed because of innovation. Some of the technologies that we’re adopting will save lives. Everything about that excites me and is absolutely the future, and the exciting thing as the future is here now in Leeds.
Contact the Innovation Pop Up team
If you are a company and would like to be a Pop Up member? Here is why you should join.
Why be a Pop Up Member
To explain why we’re a pop-up member, I should explain what we do at Better Medicine. So better medicine is in the field of AI diagnostic medical imaging, focusing on solutions in radiology for oncology, particularly for CT scans. It’s important for us to be working in ecosystems that are truly capable and set up to work with that technology like ours that have the advanced ecosystem in place and have a future vision for working with innovative companies, startups, and technologies. Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust is clearly one of those places; it’s very digitally enabled; it’s arguably one of the world’s leading UH institutions to do this.
We’ve been able to collaborate with Professor Z Minoir, and we’re talking to others across the university and the clinical ecosystem to collaborate with them, so it just made sense for us really to become members of the popup to reinforce the relationship that we have so far, so first and foremost, if you’re thinking of joining the popup, I would say you definitely should consider it’s always best to make sure that you have your interests aligned at the same time so it’s good to come here engage early and find some perhaps clinical or academic partners who can take you to the next stage, and then you will really get the value out of the Innovation popup, because you’ve already had that clinical connection. The team within the Innovation popup is there to help you to do that to help you engage and see if you have the opportunity to take things further to actually establish a project or a portfolio of work within this community, so I would say that is my advice to you if you’re considering joining the popup as a member and wanting to perhaps move things to the next level.