Piers Ricketts
Piers has been Health Innovation East’s Chief Executive since April 2018. He has led a transformation of our business, doubling our headcount and increasing our impact for patients, the wider NHS and the health and life sciences industries in our region. From 2019 to 2021 Piers served as Chair of the Health Innovation Network (formerly the AHSN Network) , comprising 15 member organisations and 800 staff. He also set up and led a team at the Department of Health for six months at the start of the pandemic, reviewing and implementing new COVID-19 testing technologies, working alongside Cabinet Office colleagues, the diagnostics industry and the UK’s most senior scientists.
Piers is a regular speaker at national and international conferences on innovation in the NHS and wider health and care. He was previously a Partner in management consulting at KPMG, where he led the firm’s Management Consulting practice in healthcare. He also worked with client management teams in healthcare, higher education and social housing on the biggest issues facing their organisations.
Piers is a Chartered Accountant and previously spent ten years in KPMG’s transaction services practice in his earlier career, supporting private and public sector clients in major commercial deals. He holds a MA in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford, and two recent qualifications in Executive Coaching from Henley Business School.
“The UK is home to some of the most brilliant researchers and innovators in healthcare and life sciences. At Health Innovation East we are privileged to work in a region which has more than its fair share of world-leading universities, start-ups and larger companies, as well as the outstanding researchers and practitioners in our NHS. However, in common with the rest of the UK, we need to get better at scaling these solutions so that they are deployed more widely and more quickly into our health and care system. I am proud to lead Health Innovation East and to play our part in solving this challenge.”