On Wednesday 5 September, the Academy held its FORUM Annual Lecture 2018 in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The lecture brought together eminent speakers from across the biomedical engineering and technology landscape, and explored how engineering and technology could transform healthcare to deliver better patient outcomes.
Dr Omar Ishrak, Chairman and CEO at Medtronic, gave the keynote on ‘Innovate, Invent, Disrupt: The importance of medical technology in transforming healthcare for the future’.
He discussed how innovation in medical technologies is creating a value-based healthcare system with the patient at the centre, and highlighted the importance of the accountability of technology companies for improving patient outcomes. This, in turn, empowers patients by ensuring that innovation is driven by their needs.
He also described three types of innovation in technology and engineering; continuous, inventive and disruptive innovation. Continuous innovation allows for improvement in technologies based real-world usage; inventive disruption can create solutions for areas of unmet clinical need; and disruptive innovation can supplant existing treatments with new innovations that are safer, less invasive, and ultimately produce better patient outcomes. All three types of innovation are essential to translating innovation to patient benefit.
The lecture was followed by a panel discussion chaired by Professor Sir Robert Lechler PMedSci, where Dr Ishrak was joined by distinguished speakers:
- Professor Alison Noble OBE FRS FREng, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford
- Professor Sebastien Ourselin, Head of the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King's College London
- Professor Lionel Tarassenko CBE FREng FMedSci, Chair in Electrical Engineering, University of Oxford
- Professor Chris Taylor OBE FREng, Professor of Medical Biophysics and Professor of Computer Science, University of Manchester
The panel echoed the importance of a patient-centric approach and provided insight into the different ways in which technology can improve patient outcomes. For example, using health apps in patient engagement and adherence and employing artificial intelligence to improve diagnosis, through to applying engineering expertise to drive surgical innovation. The discussions also underlined the value of cross-disciplinary, integrated working across engineers, medical scientists and clinicians to drive such innovation.
A video of the event will be available shortly on YouTube.
The event was held as part of the Academy's FORUM programme. To find out more about the programme, visit our dedicated webpages or email forum@acmedsci.ac.uk.