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Hywel Dda UHB awarded over £435,000 funding for research and innovation projects

13 February 2023

Hywel Dda University Health Board has been awarded over £435,000 funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) for two projects aimed at developing and improving systems to support healthcare and planning on a local and national level in Wales. 

The UKRI’s Horizon Europe Guarantee competition is providing the health board with funding of £168,268 as part of the Horizon Europe project DYNAMO. The €5million project will focus on modelling and dynamic assessment of integrated health and care pathways enhancing response capacity of health systems. DYNAMO will result in a lean and powerful solution enabling quick, data-driven and platform-independent planning of care pathways for situations where health system functions are threatened. This solution will allow EU healthcare systems to build resilience and respond to public health threats better than they can today. DYNAMO brings together four procurers from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece that not only see the need for such a solution, but are willing to act on it now. They will set up a collaborative demand-side initiative to create the economies of scale and early adoption cases required to build momentum for DYNAMO. As a strategic planning tool, DYNAMO will guide stakeholders in concept development, data modelling, process design and implementation planning. DYNAMO will be able to reliably inform medium-term investment planning to adapt existing processes and infrastructures (including IT systems). More specifically, DYNAMO will be a socio-technical system to:

  • Efficiently adapt service delivery processes to shocks and structural changes;
  • Share and integrate cross-sectoral data to accurately forecast outcomes and impacts of alternative pathway configurations;
  • Facilitate task planning and skills matching in times of crises.

The second project has been awarded £266,860 funding from UKRI’s Horizon Europe Guarantee competition as part of the Horizon Europe project Invest4Health. This project seeks to mobilise novel finance models for health promotion and disease prevention. In the medium to longer-term, the fiscal space that governments have to provide additional budgetary resources will shrink, including for healthcare. Our response is that it is better to pre-empt rather than repair i.e. to incentivise new ways of financing health promotion and disease prevention. The financing solution is smart capacitating investment. This means sharing risks and resources to invest at scale across multiple levels within health ecosystems generating sustainable returns and localised benefits. The specific objectives are to develop and test new financial models and prototype a collaborative platform for governing smart capacitating investment in health promotion and prevention.

Professor Chris Hopkins, Head of Innovation and TriTech Institute noted, “We are very excited to be involved in these projects and working with partners across Europe. Both projects offer an opportunity to develop and improve systems to support healthcare and planning on a local and national level.  We hope that these projects will enable collaborative and efficient working, leading to improved health for Wales.”