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 Medical Protection Society has launched a framework to support healthcare professionals to integrate AI safely and responsibly into practice. The ‘AI Safer Practice Framework’ guides ethical decision-making using AI and documents AI-assisted decisions for both accountability and clinical rationale.

🧰Estonian personalised cancer prevention firm Antegenes has joined Prostate Cancer Research’s ‘Proactive for your Prostate’ campaign to raise awareness of the potential for earlier, more targeted prostate cancer screening. The partnership is committed to promoting smarter, more accessible and more meaningful screening by supporting innovation, policy change and personalised tools.

💊More than 25,000 scripts have been completed by pharmacists using NHS England’s Pathfinder Independent Pharmacist Prescriber programme. Since August 2024, CLEO Systems has rolled out its electronic prescribing solution across community pharmacies in England, enabling pharmacists to prescribe for minor illnesses.

🛌Almaviva has announced a partnership with BTS to bring telerehabilitation solutions to global healthcare markets. The agreement aims to strengthen the presence of Almaviva and BTS’s complementary solutions in the Italian healthcare market and expand them internationally.

🎧Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust has been able to expand its pilot of brain stimulation headsets, following funding from the trust’s charity Raising Health. The trust’s mental health crisis service was the first in the UK to use Flow Neuroscience headsets in 2024. The recent funding has enabled it to purchase nearly 150 additional headsets for use in its other services.

🩸Menstrual health startup Joii is launching the world’s first AI-powered app that accurately measures period blood volume in the UK. Joii claims the app, which is registered as a Class I medical device in the UK, is bringing data to an area of women’s health that has long been ignored and transforms a guessing game into hard data that benefits both patients and clinicians.

❓Did you know?

Nearly all respondents to a SOTI survey of healthcare IT professionals, said that they are using AI in 2025, in comparison to just 47% in 2024.

The latest report from SOTI, ‘Healthcare’s Digital Dilemma: calculated risks and hidden challenges exposed’, found that the UK’s healthcare sector is investing in AI solutions, with the new technology improving efficiencies and IT capabilities.

But despite this, almost all of those taking part in the survey (99%) reported challenges with legacy systems, IoT and telehealth. Two thirds of respondents said they frequently faced downtime and tech issues, while 84% admitted they had experienced a system breach in the last year.

Jon Charters, key account manager at SOTI, said: “Our recent healthcare study showed that there is still a long way to go for the sector to ensure consistent uptime and full compliance and security for devices used every day.”

📖 What we’re reading

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed that more people report are contacting their GP practice online than by phone for the first time ever.

ONS statistics, published in October 2025, showed that 42.3% of patients who responded to the monthly ONS survey contacted their GP surgery via the website, NHS App, or an alternative app.

This is compared to 41.3% who contacted their surgery via the telephone. The figure for people who contact their GP surgery in person has remained fairly static at 15%.

The figures were collected between August and September 2025, prior to the national requirement to have online consultation tools open during core hours which began on 1 October 2025.

🚨Upcoming events

26 November 2025, Online – Rewired 2026 conference and programme update: November 2025