(The following article originally appeared on Ut Prosjektet's website, and is being shared here with thanks to Utprosjektet.)
After a three year lay-off thanks to the pandemic, Marks & Clerk is delighted to be hosting the UT London Conference for 28-30 September. The firm has been an UT Partner for many years with a client footprint in Trondheim, the rest of Norway and indeed the Nordic region as a whole. As well as being an UT Partner we are active sponsors of Helsinki-based Spatial8 and, back on the UK, of the Norwegian- and Finnish-British Chambers of Commerce.
We were therefore delighted with the news that the Nordic Council of Ministers intend the Nordics to be the most integrated health region in the world by 2030. A big part of this will be accelerating the adoption of digital health with its emphasis on remote diagnosis, consultation and treatment and patient self-management. This brings obvious benefits in terms of efficiency and cost-saving and COVID-induced lockdown made its increased adoption crucial in most countries but there are also technical, regulatory and risk management hurdles to overcome.
With this challenge in mind, the Nordic Digital Health and Evaluation Criteria (NordDEC) programme was set up earlier this summer to unify digital health standards across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. The attendant accreditation framework was developed by the UK’s Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps, and will provide common benchmarking criteria for developing, marketing, testing and adopting digital health products and technology safely and effectively.
So we have a pan-Nordic milestone in digital health adoption facilitated in no small part by a body from the UK, a country whose healthcare establishment is eagerly going down the same road and for the same reasons. By way of illustration, Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, has recently announced it will invest up to £4 million in projects to develop digital therapeutic extended reality (XR) solutions to provide mental health care solutions for young people and older adults. An encouraging development but, as with digital health, the much trumpeted Metaverse won’t realise its aspirations to be all-pervading without similar strides in industry standardisation.
Meanwhile, all this illustrates the synergy between the UK and the Nordic countries at a personal, academic, commercial and political level. All of them boast great universities, world-renowned tech companies and a similar business mind-set and cultural mentality. As recent global developments have demonstrated, when it really matters all of them also punch well above their weight on the world stage politically, commercially and diplomatically. What’s more, the UK is still a great place for Nordic companies to set up when they go international, albeit for slightly different reasons from when the Viking long-ships first hit the beach at Lindisfarne!
September’s UT London Conference will be a great opportunity for us all to revisit and reaffirm that synergy with more conviviality but (we hope) less pillaging than of old. Look forward to seeing you soon!
For more information on the UT London Conference 2022, including agendas and information on speakers, please read more in the dedicated page in our 'Events' section.
(Originally published on UT Prosjektet on 24 August 2022)