EFEC is working on Futures By Design to help support SMEs to digitise and grow. There are a number of synergies between EFEC and ARISE and the next step is to work on ways that EFEC FBD can play a part in the exciting futures being developed for businesses at ARISE.
Arise is an essential part of the development of Harlow’s regional economy, centred on life sciences and wellbeing. Here, we report on the recent Arise webinar, “New Horizons in Health Technology and Data.”
The word ‘ecosystem’ is used a lot these days in business to describe the way companies, resources and markets interact. It is sometimes a bit of a cliché – but in the way health services and data interact, ‘ecosystem’ is just the word.
At the centre of the webinar on 22 June on how this ecosystem works, was the host, Arise Innovation Hub in Harlow. Harlow is a focus of health industries with a major development for the UK Health Security Agency in the town.
The location is deliberate: Harlow is at the centre of the UK’s fastest growing region, the ‘M11 Corridor’. Benefitting from the global research capacities of Cambridge and London Universities, companies in life sciences are strongly attracted to the area.
The webinar heard from some of the key players shaping this life sciences ecosystem. Alongside the scene-setting by the UKHSA, their Data team outlined the phenomenal importance of data in manging public health and of course in finding new remedies. The recent pandemic brought home the value of good, accurate, up to date data.
Data of course underpins research, as shown in the presentation by the local NHS Princess Alexandra Hospital. The advent of AI, quantum computing and big data analysis means we can know more, much quicker, about health its needs and the causes of ill health. Diagnoses are speeded up and costs can be saved.
All this data takes a lot of collection, storage, access and sue – and that is where the Data Services companies come in, another vital part of the ecosystem. The KAO Data presentation took the webinar through the sheer scale of the data and the huge variety of ways it helps drive health services.
A good example of this was in the Psimonix presentation about using data to drive wellness. A healthy population restricts the needs for spending on illness recovery, so this is vital work at a personal scale – apps top track blood pressure, sugar levels and fitness all help and all need data.
Ecosystem health needs organisations to work together – the Arise Innovation Hub seminar was a powerful demonstration of how this can happen in a key part of UK society and economy: health.