Leeds Teaching Hospitals welcomes Nordic healthcare platform

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is to be home to the UK launch of a Nordic healthcare platform.

Norway-based VAR Healthcare has joined the Innovation Pop Up at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, and will be running a pilot scheme at the trust to gather feedback from nurses on the technology, language, terms and content of its platform.

The technology provides online knowledge and decision support systems for frontline staff and is already widely used across Scandinavia. The collaboration with Leeds will be its first step into the UK national health system.

As part of the collaboration Var Healthcare is adapting its content for the UK market with support from the Leeds Innovation Pop Up.

Professor David Brettle, chief scientific officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and founder of the Innovation Pop Up, said: “We are delighted to be helping VAR Healthcare build a presence in the UK. Leeds represents one of Europe’s largest medical, academic and industrial establishments and has a supportive ecosystem for health tech companies like VAR Healthcare. It is the ideal environment for scaling up innovations in healthcare.”

According to Var Healthcare, the technology is “a database of 400 up-to-date procedures plus useful tools for use in practice. The procedures are presented in such a way as to facilitate learning, supplemented with illustrations and videos and supported by knowledge summaries.”

It also includes tests and exercises, easily accessible calculators and supplementary professional material.

Ann Kristin Rotegård PhD, managing director at VAR Healthcare, said: “We have a wonderful collaboration with the Innovation Pop Up in Leeds which is opening doors for us in the UK. In the future, we would like to open a UK office and create jobs for experienced local nurses to help us grow further.”

Rotegård added: “We have ambitions to spread out further and share best practice to support all nurses so they can give the best possible patient care.”

Earlier this month Leeds Teaching Hospitals signed a deal to be part of the Leeds-Israel Innovation Healthtech Gateway which aims to build institutional links between the UK and Israel to promote tech innovation.