Health Innovation Manchester has today published a new three-year strategy, Innovation with Impact, outlining its priorities for delivering innovation across Greater Manchester to tackle the city-region’s biggest health challenges.

Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) is a place-based innovation organisation, formed by the health, care, civic and academic leaders of Greater Manchester (GM), with a vision to be world leading in improving the lives of local people, transforming care and boosting the economy through innovation.

Some of HInM’s most notable work includes joining up health and care information via the GM Care Record for all 2.8m citizens; leading the development of the GM secure data environment for research; securing £15m in Innovate UK and industry funding for programmes in advanced diagnostics and genomics; and deploying novel industry-led therapies at scale to effectively treat high cholesterol in at risk groups.

In the new strategy, HInM has unveiled an updated vision to be world leading in improving the lives of local people, transforming care and boosting the economy through innovation. This is backed by achieving four strategic objectives:

1. Address high priority drivers of population health by deploying proven innovations at scale, with a major focus on primary and secondary prevention.
2. Establish GM as a global learning market for accelerated access to novel innovations at scale
3. Optimise digital and data products and services to understand the population, define their needs and develop new models and pathways.
4. Work with partners to enhance the GM system’s capacity and capability to deliver health innovation and demonstrate impact.

HInM’s future priorities include launching a major mission on tackling cardiovascular disease, harnessing innovative solutions to find, diagnose and treat patients, developing opportunities for research and innovation in mental health, optimising digital and data, and forming multi-industry partnerships across digital, medtech and life sciences.

Chief Executive, Ben Bridgewater, commented: “The GM health and care system is facing considerable financial, operational and clinical pressures, and we know that similar challenges exist in places globally. Therefore, the need to innovate has never been more pressing to address the biggest drivers of population health, and we must ensure that groundbreaking research from both the academic and industry sectors plays through to deliver better outcomes at scale.”

 Laura Rooney, Director of Strategy, added: “In developing this strategy, we have worked in close consultation with key stakeholders from health and care, patients, clinicians and academics, coupled with input directly from industry. This has enabled us to work towards more closely aligning our innovation activities and capabilities to addressing the city-region’s biggest health challenges, prioritising the areas with the most compelling evidence for impact over the next three years.”

Through its innovation activities HInM is focused on delivering tangible benefits back to the Greater Manchester population and health and care system to help address finance, performance and population health challenges. Over the last four years HInM has developed a robust method for innovation delivery and benefits realisation, particularly learning from digitally transformed industries.

Health Innovation Manchester works across several research and innovation policy areas, integrating the functions of the national Health Innovation Network, an Academic Health Science Centre, ICS-wide digital transformation and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for Greater Manchester.