Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI)
About this good practice
As one of 7 Innovation Centres in Scotland, DHI’s vision is “innovation in digital health and care will help the people of Scotland live longer, healthier lives and provide sustainable and inclusive growth for our economies”. It is implemented by a 5 stage Innovation Process Model, beginning with engaging & scoping opportunities and challenge which leads to opportunities to initiate & develop early co-designed ideas to meet service demands. These concepts can be progressed through an evaluate & iterate, participatory design process. The model has been used to assist in increasing the readiness levels of digital health & care innovation. Our Demonstration Living Lab Environment (DSE) provides physical and safe space to experience, explore and test innovative digital capabilities and infrastructures, allowing innovators to engage and demonstrate technical capabilities that support service redesign. It also hosts health data exchange that allows partners to test and confirm that their innovation can integrate with other systems. The combination of the innovation model and DSE activity results in expanding into mobilising Living Labs along with Innovation partnership procurement, to further refine and innovate our innovation model offering. Key stakeholders involved are; industry, including the SME community, academic and civic partners. The key beneficiaries are the citizens of Scotland.
Expert opinion
The DHI seeks to co-design person-centred digital health and care solutions across service, technical and business innovation. For this end, a unique “5 stage innovation model” has been developed.
The DHI is a great example of how to set up a collaborative framework between businesses, academia, health & care professionals and the third sector. The centre fosters this collaboration through various processes and structures. For example, it develops innovation clusters such as the Healthy Ageing Innovation Cluster and operates a living lab (Demonstration & Simulation Environment.)
The latter is especially noteworthy as it is comprised of two parts: a virtual environment where people come together to create and connect digital services, using simulated data for testing and a physical environment that then demonstrates these technologies, alongside co-design and market analysis outputs, to engage and empower people to use digital capabilities to transform health and care services. Such an elaborate system has great innovation and knowledge transfer potential.
Other regions seeking to boost the innovativeness of (health & care) SMEs could surely learn from the different cooperation models implemented by DHI.
Resources needed
£10m from for 5 years activity, with addditional funds leveraged- £12.8m.
Engagement & communication satff, service designers, technical & business led expertise, market research, skills and project management resource.
Specialist innovation staff commissioned as required
Evidence of success
Since 2019 DHI has supported 33 strategic projects, including SMEs:
• Innovation Cluster - 1000 actively engaged members
• Health Ageing Innovation Cluster – 600 engaged members.
• A range of events – national & International
• Development of Strategic partnerships – Local & International
• Projects that have made an impact for the H&C system
• Research reports & publications used to influence policy
• Skills and workforce development
• Delivery of demonstrations & simulation
Potential for learning or transfer
The Innovation Centres Programme (ICs) launched in 2012, with a Phase 1 investment of £120m aiming to help businesses increase the pace of innovation, with £10m specifically awarded to DHI. As one of these ICs DHI provides a key role in collaborations between industry, academia, health & care professionals, the third sector and the citizens of Scotland. Delivering collaborative activity using 5 stage innovation model it has been able to increase the pace of innovation in digital health & care, which is evidenced in the range of projects delivered that are evidencing real impacts. DHI has Memorandums of Understand with a number of organisations to further international collaborations based on our activities and utilises many dissemination channels to share our lessons learned and best practises as widely as possible.
Further information
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Good practice owner
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Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI)