What do you get if you cross an automotive engineer with an intensive care nurse?
The digitalisation of healthcare has created a whole new profession. Health care professionals who are also engineers. This gives the West Swedish business community unique opportunities, according to Åsa Lindström at Sahlgrenska Science Park, who, herself, has a background as both an intensive care nurse and an automotive engineer.
Publish date:2019-03-19–Text:
Kenny Genborg
The two-day conference, Engineering Health, arranged by Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Chalmers University of Technology and the Sahlgrenska Academy, zooms in on the new skill requirements demanded by future health and medical care, as well as on the possibilities within healthtech. The purpose is to inspire collaborative research.
An increasingly technology-intensive healthcare industry demands that doctors and engineers work and research together. In Gothenburg, there is already a training program focused on innovation and technology for specialist doctors. Maybe, the hybrid profession of half nurse, half engineer, will now become the new standard rather than the exception.
“This completely aligns with the new direction being taken by the life science industry. A window has been opened for the West Swedish business community, where technology, IT, mobility and data analysis are skills that are tailor-made for life science,” says Åsa Lindström, who participated in the conference with an agenda item on infrastructure for research collaboration.
“Everything is in place in West Sweden to make this happen. We can build a long tradition of collaboration between academia, business and healthcare.”
Åsa Lindström, herself, has a professional background both as an intensive care nurse and as an engineer in the automotive industry.
She is also the project manager for the newly started collaboration project, Inn2Health, which is also based on encouraging more insulated industries to form collaborations with each other to develop services and products that meet needs identified by employees in health and social care.
Inn2Health, brings together six West Swedish science parks with different areas of expertise ranging from vehicles to smart textiles.
The project will increase West Swedish SMEs’ accessibility to knowledge, skills, technology and networks so they can develop innovative life science products and services.
On 15 March, the first workshop was held with significant engagement from participating companies. The subject was very relevant. Healthtech and other new solutions can reduce the high costs for healthcare when patients miss booked appointments.
