NIST Researcher Addresses London Healthcare Innovation Forum

NIST researcher Dr. Edward Griffor co-organized the London Healthcare Innovation Forum on April 3, 2025 at London’s Canary Wharf in the United Kingdom. With over 250 participants, this event brought together clinicians, entrepreneurs, and leading experts in biosciences, medicine, healthcare, technology, legal, policy, and investment to discuss the future of healthcare innovation. Throughout the day, attendees engaged in conversations about the role of technology in revolutionizing patient care, the most significant industry challenges, and the necessary steps needed to drive impactful change.

In his address, Dr. Griffor emphasized the need for patients and physicians to achieve appropriate levels of trust in today’s and tomorrow’s healthcare technologies, including advanced sensing technologies for monitoring patient trajectory and disease evolution. Measurement methods and non-invasive sensor technology can build this trust, which is critical to healthcare, both in the capabilities of personnel, treatment approaches and enabling technologies. Sufficient trust triggers reliance, i.e., use guided by clear understanding of capabilities and limitations. Sensors for data collection and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for analytics in support of treatment or diagnosis can improve decision-making (ER Physician, EMS Paramedic, etc.) and improve the overall response, but only if healthcare personnel’s understanding is calibrated to tech capabilities.

Other participants emphasized Digital Health, or the Digital Fabric of Care, that requires seamless sharing of trustworthy patient information. This digital fabric is the infrastructure that underlies information sharing and brings “healthcare connectivity” and a common understanding of the “goodness” of that information. This summit, and the previous 2024 Healthcare Innovation meeting in Gdansk, Poland, engaged research institutions, Technologists, policy makers and healthcare workers to establish dialogue to shape and promote the Fabric of Care, to establish the connections and set targets for the Digital Fabric of Care.