Digital Health Rewired 2022: Day two news roundup

The final day of Digital Health Rewired 2022 certainly did not disappoint with highlights including NHS England and Improvement’s director of transformation and the much-anticipated final of Rewired Pitchfest.

Day two kicked off with Phil Huggins, the national chief information and security officer (CISO) for health and social care. Huggins said he wants to ‘move cyber from being a technology issue to a patient care issue’ and also discussed the lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic as well as what he is hoping to achieve in his role as the national CISO.

Over on the AI and Data stage, there was a speech and presentation by Chris Kelly, staff clinicians research scientist at Google.

He spoke about delivering better healthcare using artificial intelligence (AI) and explained the three main ways this can be achieved:

• Improve accuracy/efficiency – faster, cheaper, higher quality care through use of AI-enabled tools in screening and diagnostic pathways
• Enable new models of care – bring care closer to the patient, with faster feedback loops, and easier adherence to onward investigations and treatment
• Personalised screening – maximising the efficiency of healthcare by prioritising our limited resources to those who are at highest risk

Kelly was followed in the day’s opening AI and Data session by Simon Rasalingham, CEO of Behold.ai, whose speech was titled ‘Adding AI radiological capacity into the NHS using autonomous AI diagnosis: How do we clear the runway?’

‘Patchy’ maturity levels and moonshot thinking

Also taking place in the morning was a keynote address from NHS England and Improvement’s director of transformation, Dr Timothy Ferris, who told the packed audience that the current level of digital maturity across the NHS is “patchy”.

As lunchtime rolled around, attendees were treated to a session on King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust’s joint multi-million pound electronic patient record (EPR) project which has been nicknamed ‘Apollo’.

Professor Clive Kay, CEO at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said that he believes that in this day and age, hospitals are not able to be run “safely” without an electronic patient record (EPR). While his Guy’s and Thomas’ counterpart, Professor Ian Abbs, said the upcoming EPR go live was a “moonshot” project.

Pitchfest winner is revealed….

And then to wrap up the final day, we had the much anticipated final of Pitchfest 2022. The five finalists all took to the stage to pitch their startup but in the end it was CardMedic who was crowned the winner by the judges.

The company has designed an app which aims to reduce health inequalities through improving communication between healthcare staff and patients.