NINE HEALTH CIC

A TECHNOLOGY ACCELERATOR

Nine Health CIC is a Community Interest Company (a social enterprise) created from within the NHS to improve health and well-being by accelerating the development and use of innovative technology for patient and public benefit in health and social care.

We offer three main services:

  • Data Services including Big Data, Semantics and Digitilisation
  • Research and Governance
  • Supporting Patients, Professionals, Commercials and others through Product and Service Development

 

Technology is at the centre of care management and delivery, enabling family, carers and clinicians to focus on better outcomes and experiences for the patient.

We link innovators, funders, researchers and experts taking innovative ideas or pre­market products and services from conception through to delivery within health and social care.

We build research and delivery communities using our skills

  • Data access, processing and analysis
  • Informatics
  • Research
  • Research and Information Governance Benefits Analysis (Cost, Outcomes) Market Segmentation
  • Procurement

ABOUT NINE HEALTH CIC

We deliver social benefits and return profits to those communities with whom we work.

Our vision is to drive access to and use of proven innovative technologies by patients, public and professionals.

Nine Health CIC’s mission is to accelerate innovative technology into health and social care for patient and public benefit

We focus on technology and innovation research that increases patient, public and carer access to innovative but proven evidence based technologies. We use our unique business knowledge, relationships and skills to deliver health and economic benefits for patients and the public by:

  • developing and driving innovative technologies towards markets
  • handling enablers and barriers strategically
  • increasing the desire and ability to use new technologies through education and support
  • supporting organisations, teams and people to understand and use technologies
  • supporting the research and development of ideas into products and the procurement and deployment of products into the market

The success of Nine Health CIC is built on the key principle of involving others.

We have built relationships across influential domains and disciplines that we can use to link our clients to the right people, resources and knowledge to support their needs. Our links and associations spread across the following type of organisations:

  • National innovation infrastructure
  • Academic Institutions
  • Charities
  • Clinical leads
  • Clinical Networks
  • Procurement bodies

 

We deliver bespoke projects that address our clients’ specific needs by building research and delivery communities across health and social care and related sectors. We work to connect needs, opportunities, evidence, people and organisations for the rapid and effective delivery of patient focused technologies.

The team behind Nine Health CIC has worked together in the NHS and a variety of related organisations for several years. We have history of leading teams to success through research and commercial bidding processes and a proven track record of delivering complex, high value programmes to exceptional standards.

Services

DATA SERVICES

Nine Health CIC is able to match, find and access health and social care data from robust sources to meet your requirements whether it be for research, market analysis, benefit analysis or to create software and applications. We are able to process and tag big data together with our partners for example within VPH­-Share.  Examples of our analysis have included reviewing and updating the End of Life Care Co­-review model available here.

RESEARCH

Nine Health CIC specialises in applied research particularly for health technology companies. Our experience leading health care research for the NHS has demonstrated that the commercial sector often struggles to bring its products to market. This is often due to a lack of clinical and economic evidence. We are able to bridge this gap by matching national and international funding to products and services, arranging academic support through our partnership arrangements with UK universities and designing and delivering detailed research programmes. We work internationally, throughout the UK with links in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and locally with NHS and other health and social care organisations.

INFORMATICS

To sell successfully into Health and Social Care, you need detailed information about your market size, segmentation, target population and maybe some help with your business case. The Nine Health CIC team came from the NHS Information Centre (the national NHS data repository and predecessor to NHS Digital) with many years’ experience of producing bespoke data packages and data analysis. We specialise in the development and measurement of patient, clinical and other outcomes.

BENEFITS MANAGEMENT

To improve, we all have to manage our benefits. We need to know where the benefits will come from and why they were chosen. This means more than simply writing a business case. Cases have to be turned into reality.

To us, Benefits Management is that overall set of decisions, processes and activities that makes best use of scarce resources to deliver optimal, appropriate benefits to identified stakeholders.

We tailor our approach to the way each client works and the benefits they desire. We wrap Benefits Management within our wider range of specialist experience and skills to improve the quality of our clients’ decisions and the results they achieve.

SUPPORTING YOUR MARKET ENTRY

From our work with the Department of Business Innovation and Skills , Department of Health and the Ministerial Medical Technology Strategy Group we have developed in depth knowledge of the Health and Social Care market place and procurement routes.

Nine Health CIC is here help innovators overcome the barriers commonly found when bringing their products to market. With extensive links and networks throughout the NHS, Health and Social Care markets we are ideally placed to assist clients to enter these markets swiftly.

Commercial clients feedback states that they often have to target local organisations over and over again; we understand national procurement routes and can help open doors by working with key national stakeholders and organisations targeting the correct routes for your product or service. We provide a facilitated and structured step­-by-­step pathway tailored to your unique offering.

PRODUCT AND SERVICE DEVELOPMENT

If you have an idea or a new innovative concept which will benefit patients, carers or the public and improve health and wellbeing then we’d love to hear from you. We specialise in linking innovators, funders and developing project teams to turn ideas into sustainable products and services.

If you have a product or service that could be applied within health, we can help. We are working with technology companies to transfer knowledge and skills from other sectors into the health and social care arena.

VPH-SHARE

What is VPH­Share?

VPH­Share is building a safe, online facility in which medical simulation developers can produce workflows ­ chains of processing tasks ­ to allow raw medical data to be refined into meaningful diagnostic and therapeutic information. 

Via an easy to use graphical interface, all the functions needed by workflow developers will be provided, including design, construction, data­ access and storage, test, high ­speed computation, sensitivity analyses and results presentation. By allowing users to work collaboratively, and concentrate only on the actual workflow design process, we estimate that over half the tasks usually associated with workflow project construction can be avoided. 

Huge savings in time can be made while complex interactions with infrastructure designers can be avoided. VPH­-Share will have simple workflows running within minutes.

How does VPH-Share work?

Users log­in to VPH-­Share and immediately start work, retrieving an existing workflow or beginning a new one. Components may be chosen from those available, introduced from the user’s own library, or developed in the workspace. 

Data may be created, selected or introduced from external sources and there is no restriction on component design as both graphical and command-­line interfaces are catered for. 

Users may operate a complete or part workflow and their individual constraints, whether geographical location, duration of simulation, data size or cost can be balanced by the VPH-­Share infrastructure, meaning computation can be made as efficient as possible. Results may be monitored and users can interact to alter the course of any analysis.

VPH-Share project flow diagram

The VPH­-Share Project aims to:

  • Develop and deploy the VPH info-structure, the computing infrastructure through which the VPH community will be able to store, share reuse and integrate data, information, knowledge and wisdom on the physiopathology of the human body.
  • Introduce a process by which models are formulated, analysed and annotated for integration into workflows, able to exploit the VPH info-structure.
  • Develop the concept of the patient avatar as the information representation at the centre of personalised simulations.
  • Illustrate the power of this approach using four flagship workflows based on existing, state­ of ­the ­art personalised modelling workflows, demonstrating how the predictive power of these models can be enhanced by proper assimilation of rich data and by structured recognition of variation and uncertainty.
  • Reach out, firstly to the VPH community, but then to the wider clinical and medical records communities, to ensure access to the widest possible range of data and tools, made possible by the effective and easy-­to­-use annotation and computational services that the project will provide and promote.

How will VPH-Share look?

Accessible from any computer, laptop or mobile device, users log in to the VPH-Share master interface and start work immediately.

The interface will contain services for image processing and visualisation, along with tools for helping registering new applications as web services. The Master Interface will provide:

  • Cloud Manager
  • Deployment and visualisation of atomic services and workflows
  • Data Manager
  • Upload and Download data from the storage service (LOBCDER)
    Workflows
  • View the list of workflow definition files that are currently available in the VPH­-Share infostructure and that can be executed using the Taverna Workbench workflows engine.

What will VPH-­Share contain?

As well as access to a rich library of VPH tools, services and data, the VPH­Share environment contains a semantic search capability, which allows users to search for resources relevant to their specific research question. The environment will provide infinitely scalable storage space through the cloud platform as well as high performance virtual machines, capable of supporting the demands of running biomedical workflows. As VPH­Share grows, so does its value to those who use it.

Who can use VPH-Share?

The VPH­-Share environment is intended for anyone working in medical simulation, whether clinician, scientist, physicist, engineer or programmer.