Webwatch – High Impact Innovations

High Impact Innovations is a website launched by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, which is designed to showcase case studies, videos and other material to help spread and adopt the ‘high impact innovations’ identified in the publication, Innovation health and wealth, accelerating adoption and diffusion in the NHS, as well as encourage people to use online communities for sharing real-life examples and stories.

The website has six main sections, each of which focuses on a particular area of innovation in health and social care. One of the sections is ‘Digital first’, a Department of Health initiative, which aims to reduce unnecessary face-to-face contact between patients and healthcare professionals, by incorporating technology where appropriate and useful.

Another is the ‘What is 3millionlives?’ programme, which believes that at least three million people with long-term conditions and/or social care needs could benefit from the use of telehealth and telecare services. It contains links to case studies, guides and toolkits, as well as videos of interviews with key individuals in social care.

The ‘Support for carers of people with dementia’ section includes information on the Prime Minister’s launch of the Challenge on Dementia campaign, aimed at building on the National Dementia Strategy in delivering major improvements in dementia care and research by 2015. The other three innovations are ‘Child in a chair in a day’, ‘Intra-operative fluid management’ and ‘International and commercial’.

Each section has a link to a community forum to share experiences and stories and some feature interactive maps, which provide more information about the roles and functions of the different players involved. Activity maps showing details of where high impact innovations are happening are also provided, as well as films, case studies, polls, news feeds and Twitter feeds.

Visit the High Impact Innovations website: http://www.innovation.nhs.uk/pg/dashboard