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

🦷 Silicon Practice has acquired Wysdom CloudPlus Technology, signalling Silicon Practice’s formal entry into the dental sector and a key part of its strategy to bring intuitive, secure and NHS-aligned digital solutions to a broader range of healthcare providers.

🗓️ Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has upgraded its My Care patient portal, allowing it to handle appointment reminders, pre-appointment information, confirmations and cancellations. The trust is also testing ambient voice technology from TORTUS, exploring how it may support and streamline administrative tasks.

🗺️The German Medical Institute (GMI) has partnered with Newton’s Tree to accelerate responsible AI deployment in clinical care. Together, they are working to shape the GMI’s AI strategy and roadmap through identifying clinical and operational pain points, and testing AI applications in the sandbox environment.

❤️ A researcher from University Hospitals of North Midland NHS Trust is focusing on the use of an AI model developed to help clinicians more accurately assess patients who may need cardiac surgery. Sadie Bennet’s master dissertation, which forms the foundation for the AI model, has been accepted for publication in the journal ‘Echo Research and Practice’.

💷 Nuffield Health has received £1.86 million in funding from Lombard to procure new equipment. This includes a state-of-the-art CT scanner at Nuffield’s Parkside Hospital in London, plus an endoscopy stack for Nuffield’s Bournemouth hospital and a digital theatre system for its Brighton hospital. The new equipment will integrate smart technologies to support safer, more efficient procedures.

❓Did you know?

A study from Mannheim Business School, published in the journal Nature Medicine in August 2025, has found that research is failing to keep pace with the world’s biggest health threats.

Researchers investigating the misalignment between research and disease impact were able to link 8.6 million disease-specific research publications to global disease burden data between 1999 and 2021.

They found that despite the two seemingly aligning, it was largely due to the declining impact of communicable diseases on global health.

The team identified that actual research priorities are not adapting to the growing impact of non-communicable diseases, and predicted that if current trends continue, the gap between research and disease will widen by a third over the next 25 years.

📖 What we’re reading

Dr Paul Deffley, chief medical officer, Alcidion and former NHS commissioning professional, has penned a piece focusing on the NHS 10 year health plan and how a platform approach can transform care delivery .

In the piece, published on 20 August, he writes: “The difference between success and expensive failure lies not in the sophistication of individual tools, but in our approach to the digital ecosystem itself.

“The NHS of 2035 wont be built on better versions of today’s fragmented systems – it will emerge from a fundamentally different architectural philosophy.”

To achieve this digital transformation, Deffley believes platform thinking is needed – an approach that creates a “foundational digital infrastructure upon which diverse capabilities can be built, integrated, and evolved.”

Deffley explores the characteristics he believes will define the future NHS, including seamless data liquidity, adaptive workforce capabilities and predictive and preventive care at scale.

He also suggests a four-phase framework for transformation to help the NHS move towards the digital change it needs for platform-enabled healthcare.

🚨Upcoming events

September, online event – Bridging the Digital Divide: Leadership strategies for cross-sector collaboration to reduce health inequalities