In 2018 TheHill secured grant funding from the European Union Regional Development Fund to develop digital healthcare companies within Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley, through the Oxford Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) Innovation Support for Business (ISfB) programme.
TheHill formally launched its grant-funded programme in February 2019 and over the last twelve months we have delivered a series of healthcare innovation workshops; a NHS Market Access Accelerator programme; and our traditional social mixers, which have been part of our offering since TheHill’s inception.
At the end of our first grant-funded year we reviewed our progress to date according to a series of measurable impacts. We looked at these in four main categories: enterprise, engagement, collaboration and audience.
Enterprise
We achieved our initial target hours for innovation company support early in our work and have continued to develop deeper and wider-ranging content to further support SMEs in producing impactful innovations for the NHS.
- 387 Hours of support to UK-based healthcare digital innovation companies,
- 61 companies supported,
- 6 new enterprises.
Engagement
Our programme of events has been well attended, from the smaller workshop groups to the large social mixers hosted across the local ecosystem.
- 446 people attended our social mixers and workshops
- 11 companies in the first cohort of our NHS Market Access Accelerator
Collaboration
Partnerships and collaborations are an important part of TheHill’s identity. We are proud to have partnered with EIT Health for a series of international programmes and will be developing more local partnerships as part of our Internet of Things and Living Oxford collaborations in 2020. We’re also proud to have helped one of our start-up to successfully sell into the NHS; in what we hope will be the first of many productive relationships.
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4 international collaborations
- Bootcamp Tour (2019)
- EIT Health Bridgehead (2019)
- Open API Bootcamp (2020)
- Future Digital Skills (2020)
- 1 purchase of an innovative product by an NHS Trust
Audience
We’ve been working to better understand our diverse audience which includes hospital staff, CEOs, providers of professional services, investors and digital developers. Our measurable reach includes almost a thousand engaged members of our core community and increasing interest in our growing range of communication channels.
- 957 newsletter subscribers. An increase of 144% from March 2019 to March 2020.
- 896 Twitter followers
- 84 LinkedIn followers
- 45 Yammer followers
As we reflect on the targets we’ve met, we can see TheHill is making ripples in the local ecosystem. But there’s much more work ahead of us to achieve our ambition of making an impactful and lasting contribution to the process of innovation in health and care.
This year will see the return of our NHS Market Access Accelerator, the launch of our Open API Bootcamp and the development of our Healthcare Economics module for the Future Digital Skills programme. We’re also bidding for future national and international funding which we hope will see TheHill continue to grow and expand; looking from our Oxford base to new horizons across the UK and internationally.
Impact illustration.
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