Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕

  • 28 January 2025
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

🤖 Digital dictation platform Dictate.IT has launched an AI clinical assistant feature to its clinical documentation software. The AI assistant automatically transcribes conversations between doctors and patients in real time and is designed to save admin time for healthcare professionals. All data is stored within Dictate.IT‘s UK cloud.

💷 UK-based medtech company Mulder has secured £500,000 in pre-seed funding. The female-led software-as-a-service company provides blockchain solutions designed to ensure end-to-end traceability for medical devices, enhancing patient safety and manufacturer accountability. The funding round was led by VC firm SFC Capital.

🏆 The Care Policy and Evaluation Centre and social enterprise Challenge Works will evaluate the finalists of the £4.4m Longitude Prize on Dementia, which aims to drive new technologies for people living with the early stages of the disease. Five finalists were selected in October 2024, with the winner – due to be announced in early 2026 – set to receive a £1 million grand prize.

🌿 The Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA) has approved a gardening app as a tool to support mental wellbeing. Cultivating Wellbeing is developed by horticulture charity Thrive, which offers therapeutic gardening programmes. The app helps users connect with mindful gardening activities, track their progress and access various health and wellbeing resources.

🔬 The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust has developed a new technique for extracting multiple biopsies from a single tumour using MRI guidance. By sampling three distinct regions of a tumour, clinicians at the trust received a comprehensive and accurate representation of its biology. Knowing how a tumour will grow could eventually help clinicians offer more personalised treatment to individual patients.

❓Did you know?

Online searches for advice on common childhood illnesses surged in 2024, NHS data published 11 January suggests.

Five of the 10 most visited health conditions on the NHS website last year mostly affect children. ‘Slapped cheek syndrome’ saw the biggest increase, followed by scarlet fever. There were also two million visits to advice on rashes in babies and children, and another two million to the page on chickenpox.

Searches for hand, foot and mouth disease, high cholesterol, chest infections and urinary tract infections also appeared in the top 10 most-searched list in 2024.

📖 What we’re reading

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair makes the case for digital identification in his commentary piece, ‘Digital ID is the Disruption the UK Desperately Needs‘.

Published 11 January by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Blair argues that the introduction of a digital identifier for every British citizen would provide something of a one-stop shop for interacting with public and private services.

Healthcare data, for instance, could be centralised within a single “digital wallet” that also contained an individual’s passport and driving license. He also ties digital ID to drug discovery and personalised healthcare, suggesting that it would provide necessary infrastructure for new, AI-driven services.

🚨 Upcoming events

12 February, webinar – Ensuring data quality in AI: Practical and ethical challenges

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