Digital Health & Care Institute

Overview

The Digital Health & Care Institute (DHI) is one Scotland’s 8 Innovation Centres funded by the Scottish Funding Council and Scottish Government.   We play a pivotal role in inspiring, enabling and combining world-leading industry and academic expertise with service, business and technical innovation to create person-centred digital health and care innovations to positively impact society.

DHI focuses on shirting the balance of care from traditional treatment models through the development of digital health and care innovations that focus on prevention, early detection, post event care and independent assisted living.   With our unique and valuable range of capabilities for Scotland combed with core knowledge and expertise built on the foundation of five years’ experience, we operate an effective partnership model, bringing together health and care practitioners, industry and academia to collaborate to solve key demand-led challenges.

DHI is a non for-profit organisation fully funded by Scottish Government through the Scottish Funding Council and the NHS in Scotland. Tasked with addressing the current societal challenges facing health and care services through the use of digital tools and services it also makes an economic development contribution to Scotland and the wider UK by creating opportunities for SMEs and mid cap companies to develop, test and deploy solutions into the Scottish NHS as well as generating inward investment into Scotland. DHI is also a grant awarding body, allocating funding to academic institutions individually or in partnership with industry to take forward academic research and service evaluation as a way of encouraging and supporting innovation as well as creating a credible evidence base that can help secure a route to national and international markets for companies that it works with.

The hub will focus on two main types of activity.

 

The first is “simulation”. DHI will provide data sharing infrastructure that is integrated into health board, local government and third sector care delivery systems. This will allow participating SMEs to connect to this infrastructure and show their products working within a functioning ecosystem – e.g. being able to upload monitoring data or download clinical record data. Individual simulations will be run with DHI developing ‘dummy data’ based test users that can be used to show how integrated systems work together for real, building confidence in the SME product by showing it working in tandem with health systems and other suppliers. When a simulation is successful, DHI will help the SMEs to attract further funding, using the simulation as proof of concept and route to market to improve the hit rate for funding bids.

 

The second is “demonstration”. A design, engagement and project management team will showcase services and products provided by SMEs in a Glasgow based showroom. The team will work with SMEs to create co-designed user stories about seamless and integrated digital service delivery and its benefits. In many cases parts of this story will be simulated as per the above section, to help build confidence in the feasibility and route to market. This material will be used with DHI’s partners across public services, academia and industry – to help people form consortia to seek further funding or to take products into trial or operation. As DHI regularly demonstrates these outputs, they will gather feedback and use this to inform and progress SME capabilities – both technical and commercial, while also influencing commissioners to specify digital services that align with these capabilities.

  Digital technologies.