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 European Union is co-funding a €7.8m (£6.5m) project aimed at accelerating digital health adoption across the North Sea region. Running for three years and funded through the Interreg North Sea programme, DigiH4A (Digital Health for All), will focus on tackling challenges like reimbursement pathways and building trust in digital solutions among healthcare providers and patients. DigiH4A will also develop new funding models and an action plan to help integrate digital health technologies into regional health systems, working alongside more than 200 SMEs.

🧬 Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital and UCL have reported encouraging results from an early trial of a new CRISPR/ Cas9-based treatment for transthyretin amyloidosis. Patients received the gene-editing therapy as a one-off intravenous infusion, designed to switch off the transthyretin gene in liver cells. This significantly reduces production of the harmful protein that causes damage to the heart. The phase 1 trial showed the treatment is safe in the short to medium term and suggests it could go beyond managing symptoms to potentially stopping the disease from worsening.

🤝 Sheffield Teaching Hospitals has hosted its first ‘Collaborate to Innovate’ event, bringing together the NHS, the Shelford Group and the Association of British HealthTech Industries to explore how health tech can better meet patient needs. The event on 21 November attracted more than 30 health tech companies, alongside local NHS and innovation leaders, to discuss collaboration on developing, testing and adopting new health technologies. It follows a similar event at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust earlier this year.

🔬 Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has become the first NHS hospital in London to install a diagnostic scanner that combines SPECT and CT imaging. The VERITON-CT solid state gamma camera at Royal Brompton Hospital provides detailed 3D scans of both the structure and function of organs, reducing the need for additional tests. Faster scanning times are expected to increase patient capacity by 20% in its first year, allowing the hospital to accept more referrals and improve patient experiences.

🤖 Bolton NHS Foundation Trust will start using AI technology to help doctors to detect diseases like lung cancer more quickly. Annalise.ai‘s AI-powered chest X-ray decision-support system, which is said to be capable of detecting up to 124 findings on chest radiographs, is being rolled out at seven NHS Trusts across Greater Manchester as part of a partnership between Greater Manchester Cancer Alliance, Greater Manchester Imaging Network and global health tech firm Annalise.ai.

❓Did you know?

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has been targeted by almost 5 million email attacks over the past two years, according to data published by Parliament Street on 5 November 2024.

Data obtained by the think tank under a freedom of information request found that DHSC faced 4,770,905 cyber attacks between August 2022 and October 2024, accounting for 9.31% of the department’s overall email traffic.

Spam accounted for 768,610 (16%) of the blocked threats, followed by phishing with 342,169 (7%) and 2,649 malware threats. September 2022 was the busiest month for DHSC’s systems, blocking 619,396 email threats.

📖 What we’re reading

The King’s Fund’s latest long read, Implementing a long-term plan for health: what can we learn from international examples, looks at European countries’ approaches to public health and how it could influence the NHS’s 10 year health plan for England.

Published on 5 December 2024, the article explores case studies from Denmark, Portugal and Spain’s Basque Country, which demonstrated varying degrees of success in their public health policies. Key amongst the findings is that policies typically succeed or fail based on how they are implemented, rather than the content itself.

In Denmark, for instance, phased cancer plans led to better survival rates and shorter waiting times, but differences in how regions implemented plans led to inconsistent results.

Meanwhile in the Basque Country, a strategy for tackling chronic illness promoted integrated care and improved collaboration across services, but was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which limited the ability to evaluate its long-term impact.

The report also touches on health IT as an enabler of successful health system transformation, particularly in the context of its role in integrated care. It highlights the importance of building trust in digital health technology among patients and providers to ensure successful adoption and says that implementation planning should include considerations for technology, such as allocating resources for IT infrastructure and training.

“Our research on international health plans demonstrated what we know to be true in the NHS: identifying a broad set of ambitions for improving health is relatively straightforward compared with the work of navigating systems, ways of working and varying interests and priorities in order to put those ideas into practice,” the report notes.

🚨 Upcoming events

17 December, webinar – Masterclass: Accessing GP Data with GP Connect