What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme?

Innovation accelerator programmes can be very exclusive and reliant on the privilege of the innovator to get ideas through red-tape to a viable standard, regardless of how good they are. In healthcare this disproportionately attracts innovators from the medical and management workforce, excluding many front-line and lower banded staff. One problem is that while front line staff may have good digital ideas where they are closest to the problems, they are not necessarily equipped with improvement expertise to methodically develop and test ideas to a level where they are ready to work in the health system. But improvement expertise alone is not enough. Many digital solutions need to also be commercially viable for sustainability, scale and spread. Of course a digital idea also needs digital expertise. So a balance is required between inclusive community approaches, improvement support, business support and digital expertise. The health system does not currently provide this.

What does your project aim to achieve?

Blüm Health and Hexitime believe that all innovators should be given the opportunity to bring about change. We will create a sustainable digital-improvement accelerator, powered by the expertise of an improvement community and a digital community. The project will deliver the first wave, with an evaluation to assess the viability of future waves incorporating any learning made in the first 12 months. The innovations participating in the accelerator will be focused on reducing health inequalities, but we will also use the community approach to reduce barriers to entry and support those with good ideas to help them reach their potential. This will better support lower banded staff and even patients to participate. We will also demonstrate how the supporting communities can benefit as they help innovators, by reimbursing time capacity into their own projects using Hexitime.

How will the project be delivered?

Blüm Health is an innovative digital community run by NHS doctors and software engineers, which serves to collaborate with people with good ideas who need access to software development and design capability to improve healthcare. Hexitime is a diverse community of improvement enthusiasts and professionals who support each other to improve health and care services with a unique time currency timebank. This project seeks to connect digital innovators from the Blüm digital community with improvement people from Hexitime and Q. Blüm will use their expertise as a digital accelerator to identify high potential ideas and support the innovator(s) in realising their value proposition and vision through Blüm’s bespoke tried and tested project roadmap. Q members will support with improvement expertise through the Hexitime timebank, being reimbursed with time currency for their efforts. Time currency can then be used by Q members to bring in resources to deliver local improvement projects.

How is your project going to share learning?

The very nature of what Blüm and Hexitime set out to achieve has the principles of knowledge sharing running through it. Our evaluation will better understand the viability of a joint community accelerator where all participants benefit, and the multiplier effect it can have on improvement capability. If successful, it will support future iterations of the joint community accelerator that can be scaled geographically and in number of applicants as more people in the community participate. Each of the innovations will be written up and distributed so the detail of how this works can be widely understood for future versions. This will be supported by video interviews and journal publications. Blüm health will distribute case studies through the digital community drawing on the impact of combining an improvement approach to innovation. The successful innovations will also share their time on Hexitime to coach and prepare the next wave of applicants.