Publish date: 8 March 2024
Some of the top names in digital health care joined Prof Joe Rafferty CBE this week to talk about innovation. Our CEO welcomed a range of academics and technical experts to Maghull Health Park as they spoke about partnership working to understand more from mental health data.
Joe hailed the enormous opportunities for research to boost both our communities and the economy by using our Trust’s scale and our own eagerness to embrace innovation. He said: “Our scale and presence in the city allows us to talk about the interrelationship of mental, physical and social health to look at the whole person and how they live their lives. We have a real testbed of real world evidence where we can look at opportunities to connect innovation across our organisation and beyond.”
Joe added that our existing partners including Microsoft, Holmusk, Informatics Merseyside and Apple as well as stakeholders such as the City Region and Local Council all have roles to play.
Microsoft’s Director of Innovation for Healthcare and Life Sciences (and former NHS leader) Anna Dijkstra said that Mersey Care was a really special partner in her work driving innovation in mental health and we were “making the results real for patients”.
Professor Dan Joyce from University of Liverpool spoke next. He discussed deploying how potentially rich but ‘noisy’ clinical data can be better focussed and used to help practitioners using AI. Also speaking was Nawal Roy, founder and CEO of Holmusk, a company building the world’s largest MH specific data platform. Mr Roy said his team have spent the last decade raising $100m to make sense of mental health data building a high quality clinical database to guide decisions for treatment development.
The final speaker was design engineer and CEO of Safehinge Primera, Philip Ross, whose sensory technology is already deployed in our secure settings.
Nearly 70 guests listened to the speakers. Our Chief Nurse Trish Bennett paid tribute to front line staff, their creativity and daily innovation. She said how this technology can and will help them. Summarising, Trish stated that the day was about passionately looking ahead to creating a world class research and innovation environment across Mersey Care.
Trish then linked into a large scale networking event which included contributions from our partnership with the University of Liverpool M-RIC, plus IM and an interactive mobile robot from LJMU.