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

🏆 Joe Harrison, chief executive of Milton Keynes University Hospital and national director for digital channels, has been honoured with a CBE for services to healthcare in the 2025 New Year Honour list. Harrison has overseen the development of the NHS App.

💰 MTIP, a Swiss growth and buyout firm specialising in healthcare software, has acquired a majority stake in healthcare competency management SaaS provider, Dossier Solutions. The acquisition aims to accelerate US market growth, expand geographic reach, and enhance the Dossier technology platform.

🛒 Supermarket chain Morrisons has announced the launch of its online private prescription service, the Morrisons Clinic. Launched in partnership with Phlo, the service enables customers to have medication delivered without the need for a GP appointment.

📱 Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has published a prior information notice for the procurement of a patient engagement portal solution, with a budget of £800,000, as part of the trust’s efforts to increase its digital maturity. Suppliers are invited to attend one of the preliminary market engagement sessions taking place on 23, 24 and 28 January 2025.

💲Swedish Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning software developer Corsmed, has raised a seed round of $3.5m, co-led by Luminar Ventures and BigPi Ventures, to deploy its MRI scanning software for clinical use. Corsmed’s MRI simulation platform is in use at hospitals and research institutions, including The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, to train, upskill, and assess medical practitioners and students.

❓Did you know?

The proportion of patients being diagnosed with cancer at an early stage in England has risen, according to NHS analysis.

Latest data on 13 of the most common cancers, such as breast, prostate and lung cancer, shows that nearly three in five patients are now being diagnosed at stages one or two, when the cancer is easier to treat.

Rapid cancer registration data show that 58.7% of common cancers diagnosed between September 2023 and August 2024 were identified at an early stage – an improvement of 2.7 percentage points on pre-pandemic levels.

NHS initiatives to catch cancer include the NHS lung health check and liver health programmes, which see mobile scanning trucks and vans go into communities to offer in-depth checks.

📖 What we’re reading

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) has published its paper, ‘The mRNA multiplier: Making the UK a world leader in a vital health technology’.

Darcy Ward, lead author and policy analyst at TBI, sets out that if the UK is to become a world leader in mRNA technology, then it needs to recapture the energy behind the Covid vaccine.

She writes that it is now the role of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department of Health and Social Care to work together in the same way, spurring collaboration between life-sciences companies and the NHS to develop new innovations and drive economic growth in the UK.

“The UK should be front and centre of this new frontier in medical science.

“It has all the ingredients it needs: world-class academic research institutions, a strong industry presence from biotech and pharma, an internationally respected regulatory framework through the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and a National Health Service that works closely with academia and industry to research and develop new treatments.

“But to cement its place as a world leader in mRNA technology and attract inward direct investment, the United Kingdom needs to present a clear end-to-end pathway for the design, manufacture, testing, regulation, procurement and delivery of these medicines to the world,” Ward writes.

🚨 Upcoming events

30 January, virtual event – NHS Digital Transformation 2025