Foreword Welcome to Health Innovation East It gives us great pleasure to present Health Innovation Easts first annual impact report since the rebranding of the Academic Health Science Networks last autumn. Our change of name occurred as part of the new fiveyear licence granted by NHS England to the Health Innovation Networks from 1 October 2023: we were delighted not only by the vote of confidence that the new licence represents but also by the simplicity of our new name. The current pressures facing the NHS are well documented but, in the likely absence of increased economic resources to address them, we continue to believe that innovation in the form of technology-enabled care pathways and the more extensive use of patient data to inform research and care and to predict risks provides the most plausible solution to these pressures and the greatest chance of improving impact for patients and the NHS. This year, we have continued to develop some of the major themes that will be familiar to regular readers of our annual reports. We are particularly pleased with the impact we continue to achieve through our work in cardiovascular disease (CVD), which remains our biggest area of clinical focus. This is particularly important because many aspects of CVD are considered preventable. We are delighted that over 50,000 patients in the East of England had their blood pressure or cholesterol levels treated to target NICE guidance levels this year, and that we have been able to engage over 400 GP practices in the region with tools and resources to support improved hypertension management of their patients. As part of this trend, it is also gratifying that we are now seeing the increased use of proactive search tools on an ongoing basis to identify the patients most at risk and helping them to achieve safer blood pressure levels. We have also greatly expanded our work in cutting-edge health informatics during the year, most notably with our role in the consortium that was awarded over 10 million from NHS England to design, build and operate the NHS Secure Data Environment (SDE) in the East of England. Our SDE is part of a national programme to give approved researchers, working on approved projects, secure access to NHS healthcare data for the purposes of research. Our initial use case is to develop a tool to predict the risk of readmission of patients previously hospitalised for heart failure, thus further widening the scope of our work in CVD. Finally, we continue to work closely with the extraordinarily talented clinical academics, technology innovators and other industry experts in the East of England to bring their innovations to market in the NHS and more widely. We are privileged to work in a region that benefits from such a concentration of world-leading science and technology companies, and we are keenly aware of our responsibility to partner with industry to bring their world-leading innovations to patients as quickly and effectively as possible. You can read more about our work with two companies in particular (52North Health and Neu Health) which use technology in an intuitive way to empower patients and give them quicker access to clinician support when they need it. We were also a major contributor to the significant external investment leveraged into the UKs health and life sciences industries by the national Health Innovation Network, which totalled nearly 500 million this year. All our major programmes this year highlight, as ever, the importance of our teams experience and expertise in practical implementation. The UK remains one of the leading funders of research and discovery science in health and life sciences globally, but inventions only make a difference when they are put into practice. We are proud of our role in making this happen, and the impact that we support our partners to achieve. In this brief foreword we are unable to do more than highlight some of the continuing major trends that have shaped our work this year, but we hope that you enjoy the report. We thank all the partners we have worked with this year and look forward to increasing our impact in 2024-25. Piers Ricketts Tracy Dowling Chief Executive Chair