Innovation and collaboration in NHS Wales
Respiratory Innovation Wales Respiratory Innovation Wales (RIW) Ltd was established in 2018 as a not for profit, subsidiary of Welsh Government limited by guarantee. Like so many small organisations, the global pandemic had a significant impact on business - but it also created an opportunity to re-purpose, re-brand and and refresh the management structure of the organisation, it’s drive and invigorate it’s ambition to be a world leading gateway for lung and respiratory innovation to improve the health, wellness and wealth of Wales. Positioned within Health and Social Care and Economy, Skills and Natural Resources, RIW is both privileged and uniquely placed to innovate – whether that’s ‘outside the box’ thinking on prevention and impacting on the wider determinants of health or new ways of managing, and treating conditions more effectively. This future facing approach is expected to bring about substantial benefits to health outcomes, reduce economic and environmental burden and create opportunities for the creation of wealth for the people of Wales.
RIW has made great progress over the last few months in establishing a network of clinical affiliates across Wales and, through it’s investment in people, skills and expertise, now has a future facing, specialist team of professionals expert in research, and advanced physical and digital engineering to support our partners. Coupled with RIW’s ethical approach to citizen’s science and user centric design, this ensures any product is developed from insights directly from service users. This new approach has led to some immediate success but we are always seeking to do more through collaboration to: l Enhance and develop respiratory products, services, or treatments; l Seeking real world insights advanced data science and digital engineering; l Expand our research and innovation activities The best way of illustrating our impact is by example. Recent projects include: l Long COVID virtual assistant – Cwm Taf University Health Board were pioneers in developing and introducing one of the first virtual assistants (CERi) using IBM Watson artificial intelligence trained specifically for COVID-19. RIW is working to develop and enhance this product for patients suffering from long COVID symptoms in collaboration with Scienapp following on from success at the TriTech challenge in September 2021. This will be the first virtual assistant using AI specifically for long COVID (insert hyperlink) l Dedicated Portal for 3D printing - A collaborative project between University College London IXN programme, Respiratory Innovation Wales and Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board in developing an online repository for 3D printable designs and product risk files to enable NHS and public sector to rapidly and safely 3D print anything from medical device parts to anatomical models. This physical engineering is linked to the state-of-the-art HoloRepository 2020, which allows any scan to be rendered as a 3D view using the latest techniques for organ segmentation (insert hyperlink); l Project Aria – Voice pattern recognition and analysis to support care in chronic disease - Chronic disease can often alter breathing and speech patterns and voice represent a new paradigm in data science. Subtle changes in patients with raised physiological stress, exercise or speech might not at first be apparent. ARIA uses the power of artificial intelligence to aid detection of clinically relevant information that might previously have been undetected (insert hyperlink); l Characterising Immune Response to COVID-19 - RIW submitted, won and managed an Innovate UK grant application to enable a collaborative research study with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and Hywel Dda University Health Board, with support from Accelerate at Swansea University. We believe in RIW we have the opportunity to translate good ideas into products and approaches that will improve the respiratory and lung health, wellness and wealth agenda in Wales and beyond. Interested in finding out more? Get in touch with us and ask how we can help you.
www.riwales.com
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