Public Funding for Filament Smart Things Accelerator Centre Limited

Digital health is an area that has been growing for many years but importantly has been accelerated in recent years. This acceleration has been driven by: 1. the covid-19 pandemic boosting adoption of remote patient monitoring and telehealth, 2. development of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables analysis of large amounts of different types of data to identify patterns that can help healthcare professionals determine how to better treat and manage diseases 3. increased usage of mobile health apps and wearables. This rapidly expanding market is subject to strict regulations that govern the validation and regulate the approval of digital health innovations. The emphasis is to ensure safety when used within patient care pathways and adherence to data protection regulations at the same time as being able to instill confidence for users that their data is being handled correctly. Generation of evidence is of huge importance for digital health innovation to ensure safety, effectiveness and compliance of new digital health technologies. Digital heath innovation is a field that moves at a rapid pace and allows the development of products that can be used for many different patients and diseases. As such, the ways in which these technologies are governed must constantly evolve and allow for new approaches to digital health innovation that can provide benefit for patients. Digital health technologies have the potential to vastly improve care but regulatory science must keep pace to ensure safety and to support adoption. The GRIDHealth-RSIN network brings together researchers, healthcare professionals, digital health innovators and regulatory experts to understand the gaps that exist for regulatory science in the digital health innovation field. Co-creation of new projects that generate robust evidence of safety and effectiveness; design of appropriate studies and generation of appropriate regulatory documentation, is critical to accelerate the availability of innovations to practitioners and the benefits to patients and the NHS. Such a network is required to provide training and practical regulatory support to people developing digital health products to allow them to understand the regulatory requirements and steps needed to demonstrate compliance of their potential product. This network will become part of the growing health cluster (GRIDHealth) being developed as part of the wider Glasgow Riverside Innovation District (GRID) project. The objective of GRIDHealth is simple -- to deliver high-impact healthcare innovation that can be tested in the real-world, evaluated and scaled up to the benefit of patients and the NHS across the UK.