Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕ 

Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”. 

👇 News

✍️ West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust has put to tender a £300,000 procurement opportunity for remote patient monitoring services. The contract covers the provision of remote patient monitoring services and hardware and aims to support West Suffolk’s virtual ward programme, which began in November 2022. The contract will run for three years starting March 2025, with two optional extension periods of 12 months each.

📱 An app has been launched that aims to provide support for 2.5 million people in the UK struggling to access ADHD services. Available on iOS and Android devices, Cog ADHD provides access to qualified therapists and management techniques and features an in-app toolkit provided by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. It is hoped the app will help reduce long wait times for ADHD diagnosis and treatment, which have reached up to eight years for some patients.

💰 Cambridge-based drug discovery startup Healx has secured $47 million (£37m) in a Series C funding for its latest trial for neurofibromatosis treatment. Healx, which uses AI to identify treatments for rare diseases, has raised over $100m (£78m) since its inception in 2014. In a press release, Healx said the funding would support clinical trials and the development of new treatments for nerve-related tumour and neurodevelopmental disorders.

🛠️ Digital Health & Care Scotland has launched a Digital and Data Capability Framework to support digital skills across the health and social care workforce. The framework focuses on six areas, including technology use, communication and data handling, and offers role-based guidance to help staff improve their digital competencies.

🎵 Hull-based health tech company MediMusic has won Startup of the Year at the Wallifornia MusicTech awards in Liège, Belgium. MediMusic’s AI tech uses music to help ease pain, anxiety and stress for people with dementia. The company claims its playlists reduced heart rates in dementia patients by up to a quarter in NHS trials. It is now expanding its trials in UK care homes and hospitals with support from Warner Music Group.

❓ Did you know?

A survey by business insurer QBE  found that 57% of the UK public is worried about the rapid adoption of AI in personalised medicine, particularly when it comes to staff training and data protection.

Despite these worries, 54% of the public believe AI will ultimately improve personalised treatments. QBE says the findings highlight the need for better communication around the benefits of AI and the safeguards in place to protect citizens.

On behalf of QBE, Opinium Research carried out an online survey of 2,000 UK adults aged 18 and over from 2 July 2024 to 5 July 2024.

📖 What we’re reading

A study in npj Digital Medicine has found that OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision (GPT-4V) AI model performs slightly better than human doctors in answering multiple-choice questions, but often gives dubious explanations, especially when understanding images.

‘Hidden flaws behind expert-level accuracy of multimodal GPT-4 vision in medicine‘, published on 23 July 2024, found that GPT-4V was 81.6% accurate when answering medical questions, close to human doctors’ 77.8%. However, 35.5% of GPT-4V’s correct answers were based on “flawed rationale”, particularly when understanding images, where it made mistakes in 27.2% of cases.

🚨 This week’s event

10 August, virtual event – Securing a Job in NHS Healthcare Management