Industry Briefing with Scotland’s Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre

Professor George Crooks

Chief Executive, Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre

Professor George Crooks is currently the Chief Executive of the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, Scotland’s national innovation centre for digital health and care. He leads an organisation that is tasked with delivering innovation in digital health and care that will help Scotland’s people to live longer, healthier lives, deliver sustainable health and care services for the future and create economic benefits for Scotland. DHI provides opportunities for Scotland’s public sector, academia and industry to co-design digital solutions to some of the country’s biggest health and care challenges working with patients, service users and their families.

He was previously the Medical Director for NHS 24, the Scottish Ambulance Service and Director of the Scottish Centre for Telehealth & Telecare. George was a General Medical Practitioner for 23 years in Aberdeen latterly combining that role as Director of Primary Care for Grampian. George is on the Board of the European Connected Health Alliance and is a past president of the European Health Telematics Association. He is a Board member of TEC Quality, a UK organisation leading the implementation of quality standards and practices across the assisted living sector in the UK. He was an assessor for the European Commission on programmes involving digital health and care provision, led the Integrated Care Action Group in the European Innovation Partnership for Active and Healthy Ageing and is a member of the WHO roster of experts for digital health. He has been an advisor to several European governments and global organisations including the World Bank on digital health and care. He is a member of the NIHR i4i PDA Interim Committee and also an advisor to Innovate UK for its Industrial Grand Challenge programme for Health Ageing. He is also an adjunct Professor of Telehealth at the University of Southern Denmark.

He was awarded an OBE in the Queen's New Year Honours List 2011 for services to healthcare.

Dr Abigail Lyons

Senior Business Innovation Manager, Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre

Dr Abigail Lyons is Senior Business Innovation Manager at the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI). She leads on Industry engagement for DHI and has developed a revised approach to support companies, start-ups and spin-outs advance the market readiness of their digital health and social care innovations. Central to this approach has been her development of a revised Industry Engagement Plan that emphasizes opportunities in the wider supply chain to the NHS and social care providers.

Abigail provides specialist advice and connections to individual companies and, with colleagues and external collaborators, develops events and material that support larger cohorts of innovators. This is exemplified by her championing of digital and data-driven Women’s Health Innovation. Abigail collaborated with stakeholders to develop a workshops programme that generated a shared understanding of problems inherent in women’s cardiovascular health. With representatives from health, academia, industry, policy, third sector and lived experience backgrounds, the workshops generated insights around market opportunities and provided foundations for collaborative project development.

With degrees in Immunology and Molecular Biology, Abigail’s career has woven through the triple helix of industry, academia and the public sector in Scotland and the US. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, a product development scientist at Medtronic and a programme manager at Scottish Enterprise. There she managed complex multi-partner initiatives across a range of sectors and led inter-organisational teams to commercialise customer-centric technologies and create investor-ready spinouts.

Abigail has first-hand experience of entrepreneurial endeavour: she developed a successful intrapreneurial proposition at SE and completed the Entrepreneurship Development Programme at MIT.