Digital Health Ecosystem Wales – ECHAlliance Ecosystem of the Month – April

1. What is the aim of your ecosystem?

Digital Health Ecosystem Wales (DHEW) aims to make it easier and faster to adopt digital healthcare technologies in NHS and Social Care in Wales. 

We; 

• are opening up NHS Wales systems and data to developers through a platform of APIs, reducing development time and ensuring products are better suited to NHS Wales needs 
• bring together stakeholders across the digital health community to tackle barriers and challenges to adoption and rollout, connecting projects with partners and sources of support 
• convene the digital health community through events, social media and online to showcase best practice, pilot new approaches and systems, evaluate objectively where the biggest impact can be made and share that information across Wales 

DHEW is a collaboration between Life Sciences Hub Wales (LSHW) and Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW). 

2. What is the approximate stakeholder breakdown of your ecosystem?

We have a wide and varied audience, ranging from industry, clinicians, policy makers, academics, innovators and funders from Wales, the UK and beyond. 

4. What are the key priorities and themes for your ecosystem? 

When choosing Ecosystem activities the team is guided by our four principles: 

• Does it make it easier and faster? 
• Does it use our ability to convene and connect? 
• Does it result in practical action? 
• Does it fill a gap? 

This criteria enables us to make informed decisions on what will and won’t become part of our programme, before moving projects in to production. 

We follow three workstreams which are shared between the partners: 

• Connecting People – our communications workstream which focuses on events, social media and stakeholder engagement, making connections and partnerships 
• Connecting Delivery – our projects workstream that consists of pilots, bid support and special interest groups 
• Connecting Systems – our API workstream which focuses on API development and implementation and we have developed the NHS Wales Developer Portal for anyone looking for APIs, toolkits and information on the NHS Wales digital architecture.   

5. What is your primary strength as an ecosystem?

Wales is a country of just over 3.1 million people, with seven health boards and three trusts. In comparison to others, we are a small and agile nation with an integrated digital architecture. Our small nature and culture has helped quickly build a passionate and engaged clinical, academic and industry digital health community. 

Case Studies 

For more information on the types of work we do, check out our case studies section on our website. We have piloted new technology in healthcare – testing passive RFID tagging, a physio triage chatbot, remote monitoring platforms and more. 

Contact

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email us on digital@lshubwales.com and check out our website www.digitalhealth.wales/dhew which has information on our projects and events.

Learn more about the Digital Health Ecosystem Wales here