University of Bradford to be hub for digital healthcare innovation

The University of Bradford will become a hub for the development of healthcare apps and other digital healthcare solutions after becoming the first UK higher education institution to be awarded NHS England Code4Health Community status.

The award recognises the University’s central role in creating a community of academics, clinicians, developers, suppliers and patients that will collaborate to develop and test innovative health-related technologies with the aim of these making their way into the healthcare market.
 
It follows a series of pilot courses hosted by the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences that brought together academics, clinicians and software developers to create clinical decision-making apps.

The community will have an association with the University’s Health & Wellbeing Centre (HWC), Digital Health Enterprise Zone and will focus on three areas:

• Development and evaluation of e-health solutions, including coding workshops, development of healthcare apps
• Supporting coding in the national curriculum, via the Faculty’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) Centre, which already has considerable experience in delivering STEM support to schools
• Development of Code4Health courses into MSc level modules, part of a programme to develop a healthcare informatics Master’s programme at the university, which will also strengthen links with healthcare institutions and industry to improve the adoption of health-related technologies.

Dr Samar Betmouni, Director of Clinical Pathology at the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences and Deputy Director of HWC, said: “This is a very exciting development for the University.  We have already had several enquiries about our community, ranging from secondary education to primary and secondary care, with plans to work with partners to establish this as a forum for digital healthcare innovations.  I look forward to working with a broad range of partners to expand our community and achieve our objectives.”

The NHS Code4Health programme aims to create a learning and development platform that holds a range of assets to enable the development of open source health solutions, while promoting collaboration between a broad range of communities. It encourages clinicians, developers, designers, suppliers and patients to come together to produce solutions to real needs and remove the traditional barriers to doing so. Linking with business incubator hubs it aims to turn solutions first created via NHS Code4Health into real products. 

More information can be found at https://code-4-health.org/