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

🧑‍⚕️ Healthcare technology provider OX.DH has achieved compliance with the NHS England Tech Innovation Framework. Its primary care solution, OX.gp, has been approved as a new generation electronic patient record (EPR) system for GP practices. It follows approval of the Medicus Health EPR for primary care in June 2025.

🏥 Wolters Kluwer Health has announced its UpToDate Enterprise Edition, featuring AI enhancements, will be available to healthcare systems and hospitals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa starting in Q3. This clinical decision support solution is designed to aid healthcare administrators and clinicians in delivering consistent care. It offers AI-enhanced search, providing focused answers from natural language queries, and an AI-powered analytics dashboard for organisational data insights.

🧠 Adults living in Buckinghamshire have gained round-the-clock access to free mental health resources with the online platform, Qwell. The digital mental health support tool includes access to a library of articles, podcasts and videos, online tools such as journals and trackers and a moderated peer support forum.

👩‍💻 NHS England has awarded a contract to Mastek and Templar Executives to provide Senior Information Risk Owners cyber security training to NHS boards. The agreement aims to boost the healthcare system’s resilience by enhancing leadership understanding of cyber risks and governance responsibilities.

❤️ A study published in the European Heart Journal on 9 July 2025, has confirmed that an AI tool was able to outperform existing methods of diagnosing cardiac amyloidosis. The AI model was developed by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and Ultromics Ltd. It can analyse a single echocardiogram video to detect the condition and differentiate it from similar heart issues.

❓Did you know?

A robot developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers has performed a gallbladder removal on a life-like patient model, demonstrating precision comparable to a human surgeon. The system uses a machine learning model based on the architecture that powers ChatGPT and was trained using surgical videos.

The robot successfully completed 17 tasks independently, including identifying blood vessels, applying clips and cutting tissue.

Unlike earlier surgical robots that relied on pre-programmed steps, this new system adapted to real-time changes during the procedure, such as altered tissue appearance, and responded to spoken instructions. It identified anatomical features, grasped them precisely and was able to adapt its action based on feedback it was given at the time and as the surgery progressed.

Axel Krieger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, noted this advancement signifies a move towards robots that “truly understand surgical procedures,” bringing autonomous surgical systems closer to clinical viability.

📖 What we’re reading

Elsevier has published a report revealing the different attitudes of clinicians towards AI globally, drawing from a survey of 2,206 clinicians from 109 countries, carried out online between March 2025 and April 2025.

The ‘Clinician of the Future 2025‘ report, published on 9 July 2025, highlights the growing presence of AI in clinical practice, with 48% of clinicians using AI tools for work, up from 26% in the 2024 report.

Clinicians anticipate that AI will offer benefits such as time savings (70%), faster diagnoses (58%) and more accurate diagnoses (54%). Over half (55%) expect AI to improve patient outcomes, and 56% foresee AI analysing all medical images within two to three years.

According to the report the ways that clinicians would most like to use AI tools in their practice are: identifying drug interactions (89%); analysing medical imaging (82%)l and providing a patient medication summary (81%).

In the UK, clinicians are more sceptical than most about the potential benefits that AI can bring are are less likely to use it for clinical decision making and second opinions. Overall AI usage for work in the UK is 34%, a figure lower than the global average.

The report suggest more needs to be done for AI tools to gain more widespread use in healthcare, with only 32% of clinicians feeling supported by their organisation with digital tools like AI.

🚨Upcoming events

31 July, online event – NHS Digital Health 2025