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 

???? The London Clinic has announced the launch of a new 24/7 primary care service (private GP), as well as introducing a programme for new on-site GP services at our world class hospital located on Harley Street. The London Clinic will be offering these services to its patients through new partnerships with Doctorcall, the longest-standing provider of private patient home visiting services in the country, and MyHealthcare Clinic, a doctor-led private GP service with extensive experience of delivering high quality healthcare across the UK. 

???? A revolutionary app has launched to tackle the staggering number of UTI-related hospital admissions in the UK. The Rightdose Self-Test & Treat App, in collaboration with Newfoundland Diagnostics, empowers individuals to test and treat UTIs from the comfort of their homes. The launch comes as NHS England data revealed a concerning trend, with almost two million hospital admissions in the last five years caused by UTIs or were found to have a UTI after being admitted for another reason. 

???? UK Charity The Cancer Awareness Trust has joined forces with Cancer Central, which becomes The Cancer Awareness Trusts’ latest Founding Partner. Collaboration with Cancer Central’s platform, Cancer Platform, will mean the practical, technical, and intellectual insights that the organisation has gathered during their own development journey, will be utilised by The Cancer Awareness Trust to help inform the build and development of Cancer Platform – a free to use, global resource that will better equip people affected by cancer to find expert information they can trust, quickly and easily. 

⚗ The search for male birth control that’s more effective than condoms and less drastic than vasectomies is heating up. Spurred in the US by women’s waning reproductive rights, men are now more interested in protecting against unwanted pregnancy. “A lot of people are looking and thinking well, if we can’t come at this from the women’s perspective, maybe we need to come at this from the men’s perspective and get more men involved in reproductive health,” said Kevin Eisenfrats, CEO and co-founder of the device startup Contraline told Stat. 

????‍⚕️ Once again, researchers are looking at how reliable ChatGPT is at dishing out medical advice. A team from Johns Hopkins University conducted a new study that found the popular AI chatbot provided “mostly appropriate” responses to questions related to core-needle biopsy results. The findings are published in the American Journal of Roentgenology. [1] 

❓ Did you know that? 

Recent research has revealed that Low Density Lipoprotein (LDL) – considered “bad” cholesterol because it contributes to cholesterol build-up and blockage in the arteries – spikes by 20% in the days after Christmas. That’s due to the amount of rich foods that we eat over the holiday. 

???? What we’re reading 

From Nov 1–2, 2023, the UK hosted the first global summit on AI safety, with 150 or so representatives from national governments, industry, academia, and civil society attended, including US Vice President Kamala Harris, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and senior executives from major technology companies. The focus was on frontier AI, defined by the UK Government in a publication released in advance of the summit as “highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models”. In other words, technologies on the cutting edge and beyond.

???? This week’s events 

9 January — Future cancer inquiry, House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee