Sony and Alder Hey Children's Hospital Drive Innovation in Children's Medicine

Sony's healthcare solutions team and Alder Hey Children's Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will collaborate to research and develop innovative solutions using advanced digital technology to improve the healthcare experience and care for children and young people..

Collaboration is at the epicenter of this public-private partnership, in which Sony will provide access to the latest innovations from its entire portfolio of solutions for the healthcare sector, y Alder Hey will provide valuable information and comments from medical professionals specialized in pediatrics, children and young people in the hospital, which through its NHS foundation cares for more than 275. 000 children and young people every year.

For this, Sony will appoint a team, who will be present full time at Alder Hey, to work with hospital innovation professionals using digital technology to solve real clinical challenges and evaluate positive effects on patient care. The results of this collaboration will be published so that hospitals around the world can learn about the beneficial use of technology for patient care., as well as to inspire future advances in this field.

This innovation partnership was established after Sony won a public tender to supply equipment to the operating rooms of the new Alder Hey hospital., including the latest educational and communications technologies, such as conferencing systems inside operating rooms to stay in touch with top experts from around the world during complicated procedures, as well as the possibility of recording surgical interventions for training.

During this period it became clear that there were great possibilities to work in a research association to apply the use of digital technologies in the hospital environment.. Until now, This partnership has made Alder Hey the first hospital in the world to truly explore the possibilities of entertaining patients during their stay in the surgery unit., which has led to the installation of a large-scale interactive digital aquarium.

This interactive solution has been supplied and custom designed by Sony PCL, division of the Japanese multinational that provides digital and video production solutions, is currently being evaluated by the hospital as a method to reduce stress in patients before interventions.

Iain Hennessey, specialist pediatric surgeon and clinical lead for innovation at Alder Hey, assures that “we are open to exploring new ideas and technologies to improve care for our patients.”. We have created an innovative hospital and it has been very appropriate to create a space for innovation and research, where our scientists and doctors can collaborate freely with external experts and companies to develop new ideas, develop them, try them and, finally, share the results”.

The collaborative work that the hospital carries out with Sony is, for this person in charge, “very stimulating for everyone involved and our co-location in a busy hospital means we can constantly gain insight from our key clients: children and young people.

For your part, the head of Sony's healthcare solutions business in Europe, Ludger Philippsen, underlines that the Alder Hey project “is a great example of the broad possibilities of Sony's business for the healthcare sector, that demonstrates how we can technologically help hospitals and other medical centers in their workflow. This does not mean that we only supply individual products for the operating room., but we act as advisors, with decades of experience, in the development of technologies for very specific professional environments”.