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

🏋️ Health tech company DocHQ has partnered with physiotherapy provider, First Point Physio, to extend its services to NHS patients registered at 160 GP surgeries. DocHQ uses AI and computer vision to support physios, delivering 600 preloaded workouts for 80 conditions. It works using any home device with a camera, like a smartphone or laptop etc, and collects data from 111 body points in real-time.

🩻 Patients at North Middlesex University Hospital will benefit from faster cancer treatment thanks to the arrival of a new radiotherapy machine. The new linear accelerator machine can more precisely target tumours, causing less damage to surrounding healthy tissues. The government has invested £70 million in 28 upgraded machines across the NHS in England under the Plan for Change.

😌 Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has installed new equipment to make experiences of A&E departments more supportive for patients with autism and other neurodiverse conditions. The interactive panels create snowfall effects, light and sound effects in response to noise and voice and can help to prevent dysregulation and anxiety. The equipment forms part of improvements to make Sheffield Teaching Hospitals a more neurodiverse-friendly environment.

💊 A growing number of community pharmacies are now delivering Pharmacy First consultations to patients through the My Local Surgery platform, which went live 12 months ago. There are now 90 pharmacies providing consultations through the digital healthcare hub, where patients can book free video consultations under the NHS Pharmacy First scheme and access other pharmacy services. In the initial phase, more than 20,000 consultations have been provided across England.

🤝 Med tech company Tachmed has partnered with device maker Paragraf to bring scalable, cost-effective and accurate diagnostic testing to homes and primary care clinics. The partnership will focus on the integration of Paragraf’s proprietary graphene sensor technology into Tachmed’s digital health platform, TachShield. The cloud-based system combines rapid diagnostic tests, connected devices, software and APIs through a single mobile app.

❓Did you know?

The total number of active users on MyFrimleyHealth Record rose by almost 100,000 between March 2024 and March 2024, growing from 183,000 users to more than 280,000.

The mobile app and website, which is transforming how patients at Frimley Health engage with their care, had the fastest sign-up rate among similar platforms in the UK during the last year, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust said. 

At the end of March 2025, over 48% of patients cared for at the trust during the previous 12 months had registered with the app. The figure in the year to April 2024 was 36%.

📖 What we’re reading

The report ‘Time to Care: How AI-powered tools are transforming healthcare for clinicians and patients,’ published by Tandem Health on 27 May 2025, finds that 70% of patients believe AI technology could help doctors spend more time on care. 

In a survey of more than 2,000 patients and clinicians, 56% of patients said they often or sometimes felt that doctors were too busy with paperwork to concentrate fully on them. Meanwhile, 98% of patients said it was “extremely important” that doctors spend less time on administration and more time providing direct care.

Clinicians echoed these concerns, with 79% saying administrative tasks reduce the time they can spend with patients, and 64% believing the growing documentation burden is negatively impacting the quality of patient interactions.

Nearly four in ten clinicians (38%) believe AI scribing tools could improve patient interaction. Almost nine in 10 (86%) patients said they’d be comfortable with AI-powered transcription if it improved the accuracy and efficiency of consultations.

Katie Baker, director, UK & Ireland at Tandem Health, said: “Technology should empower doctors, not replace them. By integrating AI into everyday workflows, we can reduce the administrative weight dragging doctors down, and put the focus back where it belongs: on delivering compassionate, high-quality patient care.”

🚨Upcoming events

6 June, London – Google Cloud Future of Health and Life Sciences Tech Forum 2025