Innovation Hub

Innovation is an opportunity to deliver healthcare in new and better ways, as well as address existing challenges that staff at GOSH can face.

The Innovation Hub works with staff to discover the problems they face and their ideas for how to solve them. The GOSH Ideas Platform is a simple form that captures staffs’ issues and ideas.

The team at the Innovation Hub then lend their expertise to work with relevant teams across the hospital and understand how the ideas could be taken forward. 

Working with budding innovators from both within and outside of the hospital, the team conduct proof-of-concept testing of new technologies prior to early phase evaluation in hospitals.  Together we understand if the idea or product can become an everyday reality providing benefit for patients, their families, healthcare staff at GOSH and also beyond. 

For example, the team has worked closely with mobile application developers, co-ordinating their interaction with relevant clinical teams, as well as patients and their families at the hospital to understand how the app could be used.

Collaborative working underpins all of DRIVE's work. The Innovation Hub is a key mechanism for industry partners to engage with DRIVE and explore how their technologies can deliver benefits for children and young people, as well as improving the experience for them, their families and staff at GOSH. DRIVE has partnered with a breadth of organisations bringing together multiple disciplines and areas of expertise.

For example, DRIVE worked with Zoom at the very early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement video appointments and integrate this with existing electronic patient record systems to ensure seamless communication between patients and healthcare professionals.

Find out more about opportunities for commercial and industry partnerships.

Idea: Staff use an electronic drug calculator which can be filled in with patient weight and age. It then auto-calculates the relevant numbers. Staff felt that most of the formulae for the drug infusions needed some adjustment, and they wanted to expand the number of drugs included. 

Solution: The team at DRIVE looped the team in with other clinical colleagues that had developed a similar calculator, which could be adapted for their purposes. 

Idea: Staff had the idea of creating a digital travel reimbursement form. Prior to this these came in paper form meaning staff would have to manually enter the forms into their system. 

Solution: The team at DRIVE explored the option of creating a digital form before deciding that this should be integrated into Epic. This process is now complete and the form is in use across the hospital. 

Idea: Staff wanted to track asthma outcomes, incorporating patient reported outcome measures, lung function, and physiological measures to link these measures with medication adherence. 

Outcome: In collaboration with colleagues in our Heart and Lung Directorate, data experts at DRIVE are looking at how we could produce a unified report like this.