David Walliker’s digital innovation talk brings record numbers to TheHill’s November networking event

Our November social mixer was one of the best attended of 2019 and a testament to the building interest and enthusiasm for digital healthcare and the support TheHill provides. Just under a hundred guests joined us to network with like-minded innovators, entrepreneurs and digital experts in the George Pickering Education Centre of the John Radcliffe Hospital.

One of the attractions of the event was the opportunity to hear David Walliker speak. David is the recently appointed Chief Digital and Partnerships Officer for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. He spoke for thirty minutes about his experience of leading a digitisation programme at The Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the live saving results including a reduction in sepsis shock from 50% to 8%.

He also spoke about the benefits of agile methodologies and cultural change. “We have to move quickly and say that it’s OK to fail. If we don’t create a culture of failure, we won’t create a culture of success. We have to see that every programme, sprint, cycle and rewrite of a product is an improvement. We need the whole organisation to work in an agile way and stop saying we can’t do that because we are counting money.”

Three European companies visiting the UK as part of the EIT Health bootcamp tour also spoke about their ideas for digital innovation. Josué Pagán Ortiz from Spain, explained Brainguard, a wearable wristband for predicting migraines which monitors skin temperature and heart rate. Brainguard hopes to raise €0.5m to scale up and run clinical trials in Oxford. Laura Lohoff from Munich, spoke about Deepc; an AI technology which detects anomalies on CT scans. The firm has already raised €1m to take the product forward. Bart Kölling from The Natherlands explained how shattering a collarbone while snowboarding was his motivation in co-founding Slam Orthopedic. The company has developed a drilling gauge to save time and improve accuracy for orthopaedic surgeons.

Guests also picked up copies of The View from The Hill; a brochure explaining TheHill’s services to startups, what we’ve done in 2019 and our plans for the future. Among the crowd were journalists from Oxfordshire innovation news site TechTribe who later published a detailed write up of the event on their website.