Multi-million-pound university centre set to open its doors

A multi-million-pound digital health facility is to open its doors at the University of Bradford tomorrow.

The Digital Health Enterprise Zone is a £13.5m partnership led by the University of Bradford with Bradford Council, with £3.8m of capital funding from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The DHEZ Academic building on the University of Bradford City Campus, Phoenix South West, has undergone an extensive transformation to become a leading edge digital health research facility.

Academics, students, businesses and health professionals will use the centre, which has been created to support the research and development of digital health innovations to improve the lives of people living with long-term conditions.

It is to become the university’s focal point for access to the newest technology, research, and projects in digital health; with four floors of research, learning, exhibition and business incubation space.  It has public clinics for physiotherapy, eye examinations and reviews of patient medicines which use the latest industry standard technology for high quality teaching and patient experiences.

It will have a two bedroom Technology Smart House that links to a 50-seat lecture theatre. The Technology House will serve as a demonstrator of research and undergraduate and postgraduate projects to showcase technological advancement in digital health that can benefit people in their homes.

Professor Allan Kellehear, director of the centre said: “By creating unique relationships between different groups of professionals we can design new and innovative projects that improve the way health and health care is delivered in the future.  This new DHEZ Academic building is designed to inspire and nurture these innovations and I’m very excited and proud to be leading it.”

DHEZ Academic will also house dedicated research units for healthcare engineering, digital diagnostics and health promotion. We will be using the latest technologies in digital pathology, embedded electronics, mobile, wireless and satellite communications, biosensors, Internet of Things, semantic web, cloud computing, big data analytics, image processing, and biomaterials, and exploiting open standards and open-source platforms

Matthew Swindells, National Director (Operations and Information) for NHS England will officially open the DHEZ (Academic) building tomorrow.

Facilities housed in the centre include:

• Medicines Advice Hub
• Eye clinic, ocular and refraction rooms, and gait lab
• Pathology Suite
• Phlebotomy Lab
• Physiotherapy Clinic, movement lab and walk lab
• Business Incubation offices

DHEZ Academic has strong relationships with the Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership, local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and Trusts, and a growing number of partnerships with the Bradford Institute of Health Research, including the establishment of the Wolfson Centre for Applied Healthcare.