Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) have a vital role in helping the NHS meet the challenges of 21st century health and care. We find solutions to health and care challenges – individually and collectively we use our unique connections with the NHS, universities, industry, patients and the third sector. We identify and support the development of proven innovations and work together to spread these at pace and scale.
The AHSNs’ project pipeline identifies, assesses, prioritises and supports innovations with potential to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, from development of early concept ideas through to deployment at scale of proven technologies.
Projects enter the pipeline from many sources – from individual clinical innovators through small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to national and international corporations.
The pipeline has three phases, with some overlap between them:
Real world examples of how the Oxford AHSN supports this process are set out in these case studies:
Discover – Creating value propositions for innovations at an early stage of their development
- Start-up companies get expert support from Oxford AHSN Accelerator programme and leverage over £2 million
- CanSense and Dravya Discovery each receive £50,000 investment through Oxford AHSN Accelerator programme
Develop – Delivering the value propositions of innovations for which there is a confirmed need
- NEW! Artificial intelligence platform predicts cardiovascular risk for suspected coronary artery disease
- Evaluation highlights potential of new tool to transform diagnosis and monitoring of patients with rare chronic liver disease
- Evaluating AI-enhanced technology to identify patients at risk of developing diabetes
- Oxford AHSN helps four companies leverage more than £5million from the AI in health and care award
- Unique point of care blood test speeds up clinical decision making, improves quality of care and reduces costs
- Oxford AHSN reaches first key milestone in major European partnership to improve outcomes for sepsis patients
- Collaboration develops environmentally-friendly product addressing urinary incontinence
- Oxford AHSN assists Fujifilm in real-world evaluation of point of care flu test
- Oxford AHSN develops the business case for cobas® Liat® influenza test and wins Near Patient Testing award at the UK Diagnostics Summit
- Feasibility study for introducing a new rapid point-of-care HIV test into sexual health clinics
- Oxford AHSN and Perspectum Diagnostics enabled by Office for Life Sciences and Innovate UK funding to collect supporting evidence on the impact of LiverMultiScan in the NHS
Deploy – Delivering the value proposition benefits of proven innovations
- NEW! South East AHSNs collaborate to support adoption of home testing to identify diabetic patients at risk of chronic kidney disease
- Support from the Oxford AHSN helps digital innovators develop and roll out automated telemedicine
- Harnessing technology for quicker stroke care
- Better diagnosis of pre-eclampsia to improve patient safety and reduce burden on the maternity system