The West Midlands Health and Wellbeing Innovation Network (WMHWIN) is focussed on creating real world impact in Healthcare through innovation.

The first cohort of the programme which kicked off in October 2021 has delivered on this aim by bringing together an ecosystem of innovators who are making excellent progress to solve the challenges of Waste Management and Moving People and Equipment.

The programme kicked off with a number of week long design sprints in which five businesses were co-located on the UHCW site. This enabled direct collaboration with the people who will use the intended services, from porters through to nurses and managers. The collaboration extended from the end users to inter-participant as they successfully created a roadmap for how their solutions would integrate and deliver value to the hospital at the right time.

The process resulted in the creation of a fully working prototype of an end to end waste management system and logistics system. The remaining weeks of the programme involve the creation of a fully deployable system which can scale into multiple streams both at University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire and across the NHS.

This first cohort has validated that a dynamic group of innovators can come together to rapidly solve the NHS’s challenges, demonstrate new ways of working and create an ecosystem of suppliers that can accelerate the adoption and implementation of Innovation in the NHS.

We recently chatted to Ali Bahsoun (MediShout) to find out why he joined the network and how MediShout is helping the NHS to innovate. Watch the vide here:

Introduction by Sam Alsopp-Hall, (WMHWIN) Entrepreneur in Residence

Innovation is the most important thing that needs to happen in the next two to three years in the health service. I think there’s not enough workforce, there’s not enough money, there’s not enough time in the day for health colleagues to do things – So you’ve got to try and work out a way to do it differently; whether that’s using technology, or that’s using resources more effectively. There must be answers out there that just need to be bought into the fold.

And it’s really really difficult to do, it’s easier said than done. I think the West Midlands can be at the forefront of that. We’ve got teaching hospitals, we’ve got innovative people that work across the health service already, we just need to bring those people together.

Ali Bahsoun, Chief Product Officer & Co-founder of MediShout

Hi my name is Ali Bahsoun – I’m the chief product officer at MediShout. I’m also one of the NHS clinic entrepreneurs and I’m an ex-clinician by background.

Well MediShout is a single portal that allows hospital staff to report any operational issue they face, and then our system will triage that, understand it, and send it to the correct help desk through the appropriate channels.

Right now there’s a big drive to innovate in the healthcare space, as opposed to creating business within the healthcare space. This might be subjective, but in my mind innovation is really around solving real-world problems, and it’s not about delivering I.T. or delivering software to solve these actual problems – You really have to understand the individuals in their day-to-day life.

When we found out about (WMHWIN) and the challenge it was perfect for us, because it outlined who the personas are, who the individuals are and what problems they’re facing. It managed to get several vendors around the table to discuss what is the best solution to help this hospital achieve their goals.

The solution that we’ve created is firstly, a product that we can take elsewhere, but we also have a given use case and how is it practically used, what impact has it had, and that’s all really built into this program.

One of the first things that we did is to discuss what are the experiments we need to do, how do we evaluate those experiments. This process is really going to help us move out of an MVP and a delivery, to have a use case to have actual tangible returns on investment.

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