Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) has released its Annual Innovation Impact Report for 2023 to 2024, highlighting the difference it is making to improving the health and wellbeing of the Greater Manchester’s population. 

Now in its seventh year of operation, the report particularly focusses on four priority areas that has delivered the greatest benefits to the health and care system. This includes, working on improving the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, the development of a more effective obesity pathway, the wider deployment of virtual wards to enable people to be treated at home and optimising the GM Care Record to give clinicians better access to information to support more informed care for patients.

Highlights detailed in the report include:

• Enhancing the GM Care Record to inform patient care: over 21,000 healthcare professionals are now accessing the Record over 270,000 times each month. This represents a 21% annual increase in usage. Accessing an up-to-date patient record that includes information from all services saves valuable time and supports more informed clinical decisions.
• Increasing access to novel therapies for people with high cholesterol: By the end of March 2024, 1,179 at-risk people have received a novel therapy to lower their cholesterol to prevent a heart attack or stroke. In this group, 496 people have since been reviewed and their cholesterol has been reduced by 44%.
• Deploying virtual wards across Greater Manchester: From February 2023 to January 2024, NHS trusts in Greater Manchester delivered over 1,000 virtual ward beds running at an average of 74% occupancy, potentially delivering a net saving of £13.8m.
• Understanding the obesity pathway across Greater Manchester: A first-time in-depth analysis and review of the obesity pathway in GM showed around 1 in 4 adults living with obesity with an estimated cost of obesity and related disease in GM of £3.2billion. Future work will identify where improvements can be made.

The report also highlights a range of other projects such as the support provided to General Practices with their digital transformation. These projects have been delivered in collaboration with other organisations and in response to requests from the national Health Innovation Network, the Academic Health Science Centre, the NHS GM Digital Transformation Office and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester (ARC-GM).

This is also the final year of Rowena Burns’ tenure as chair of Health Innovation Manchester, after founding the organisation several years ago. HInM announced earlier this year that Mark Britnell, a global healthcare leader, will be taking up the post from 1 September 2024.

Rowena Burns, Chair at Health Innovation Manchester, said:  “Health Innovation Manchester’s mission is to improve the health of our 3 million residents through industry-led innovation. Our exceptional partnership between GM’s NHS, universities, and local authorities has had another year of solid progress, with new and exciting industry collaborations and a focus on working within our communities to develop new diagnostics and preventative treatments, tackling the underlying causes of ill-health.

“It has been my privilege to lead this committed partnership for the past seven years, and as I hand the baton to my successor I would like to pay tribute to Ben Bridgewater, HInM’s outstanding Chief Executive, and to his team of talented executives. It is their work, and Ben’s leadership, which have delivered and will continue to deliver the transformational change so needed in our approach to the health and care of Greater Manchester’s citizens and patients. I would also like to thank the members of our Board, for their constancy, insight, and wisdom; as the leaders of their organisations and professions their advocacy has been pivotal in establishing HInM as the accepted voice of innovation in health. The addition of several new Board members with global experience in industry and health sciences has further enhanced our breadth and depth this year, and with Professor Mark Britnell as HInM’s incoming chair I take my leave, content that HInM’s best years are yet to come!”

Professor Ben Bridgewater, Chief Executive at Health Innovation Manchester, said: “Pressures facing health and care systems around the world are mounting, not least here in the UK and in Greater Manchester’s integrated care system in particular. Poor standards of population health are an urgent challenge, with pockets of deep inequalities in many communities, contributing to further growth in demand for health and care services.

“Research and innovation, and record levels of industry investment, are providing the tools with which we can tackle these challenges, with massive advances in artificial intelligence, precision medicine and other novel technologies – the opportunity and the need to partner with industry has never been more pressing.

“We demonstrate the difference innovation can make through this impact report, much of which has been delivered though industry partnerships, and believe that innovation will need to continue to grow in relevance and focus for the health and care system to get to grips with the current financial, population health and performance challenges”