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

🦾 A Scottish health-tech startup has secured £800,000 in seed funding to develop a bionic hand. Unlike conventional robotic prosthesis, Edinburgh-based Metacarpal‘s bionic hand combines body-powered control with “myoelectric” mechanical features, resulting in a prosthetic that offers five-finger motion and variable grips wrist positions, without the need for electronics.

♥️ A three-year-old boy has become the first patient in the UK to benefit from new, “state-of-the-art” extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) technology for treating severe heart conditions caused by viral infections. Freddie Julian received the treatment, which involves using an ECMO machine to temporarily take over the function of his heart and lungs, at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, after becoming critically ill. 

🩻 North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust is offering same-day CT scans in an effort to cut waiting times for cancer patients, following successful trials. Peterborough City and Hinchingbrooke Hospitals said they have seen a “positive uptake of the service”, which is available to qualifying patients who attend the trust’s endoscopy department.

🧠 A new approach to brain stimulation could significantly improve symptom control for people living with Parkinson’s disease. Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco have developed “adaptive” deep brain stimulation (DBS), which automatically adjusts the level of electrical stimulation in response to real-time brain signals. The technique, tested in a pilot study, was found to reduce the duration of bothersome symptoms by 50% compared to traditional DBS.

💰 The Department of Health and Social Care has announced a £400 million investment to enhance the UK’s clinical trials capacity. The Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicine Pricing, Access and Growth Investment Programme is a public-private partnership that will focus on accelerating research and development in the life sciences sector. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the investment would help make the NHS “an engine for growth” and ensure patients had faster access to cutting-edge treatments.

❓Did you know?

A study by US urologists exploring the utility of ChatGPT in responding to patient queries found that the AI model gave “acceptable” responses in almost half of cases.

 ‘Assessing Artificial Intelligence–Generated Responses to Urology Patient In-Basket Messages‘, was published in the September 2024 issue of Urology Practice.

For the study, 100 anonymised electronic patient messages to a urologist at a men’s health clinic were collected and categorised based on their content and complexity, before being fed into ChatGPT.

Of the responses generated by the AI model, the researchers deemed 47% of them to be “acceptable to send to patients.” For simpler questions, 56% of responses were rated as acceptable, while for more complex questions, 34% were deemed acceptable.

📖 What we’re reading

A scoping review published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood highlights the importance of considering the preferences of children and young people when developing health technologies.

‘Children and young people’s preferences and needs when using health technology to self-manage a long-term condition: a scoping review‘, published in August 2024, was led by Dr Jackie Martin-Kerry, research fellow in qualitative process evaluation at the University of Leicester.

The report underscores the need for developers to involve children and young people in the design and implementation of health technologies to ensure their meet their specific needs. This includes being easy to use, customisable and offering control of how their information is shared. 

Children and young people also value interactive features like games and incentives to keep them engaged, the review states.

“Future research should involve children and young people who are living with the respective conditions throughout development of the technologies, from identifying their unmet needs through to final design, evaluation and implementation, to address the identified needs and preferences,” Martin-Kerry said.

🚨Upcoming events

9 September, webinar  – Introduction to the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme