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

📂 X-on Health has announced the launch of Omni Consult, an upgrade to its Surgery Connect platform that reshapes how patients submit medical requests and how GP practices manage triage workflows. The new functionality unifies patient submissions across channels into a single stream, helping GP practices accelerate clinical response times while reducing administrative burden.

🏥Virtual reality (VR) is allowing trainee surgeons and their peers at London Northwest University Healthcare NHS Trust to learn about complex surgical procedures outside the operating theatre. St Mark’s National Bowel Hospital teamed up with Cambridge-based technology company Revolve Labs to produce the first in a series of immersive VR experiences that could transform how surgery is taught.

🏃‍♀️ Digital-first healthcare provider Livi has announced a strategic partnership with AI-powered health platform CloudFit to deliver a preventative health solution designed for the global corporate wellness market. The partnership combines Livi’s on-demand GP consultations with CloudFit’s AI-driven fitness, nutrition and lifestyle support to create a pathway from clinical care to sustained health behaviour change.

🥦 Online pharmacy Pharmacy2U has entered a strategic partnership with Reset Health, which provides digital weight management support to chronic disease patients. The two companies aim to build a long-term collaboration in the UK obesity market to deliver end-to-end treatment and care for the growing population using GLP-1 medications.

🤖Elsevier has announced major content and technology enhancements to its clinical decision support tool ClinicalKey AI in response to clinicians demand for transparency, security, and quality assurance in medical AI tools. The expanded content set provides new real-time verification steps to allow clinicians to trace the exact evidence that was used to create an answer.

❓ Did you know that?

AI could soon help patients make sense of complex medical scan results, making them far easier to understand without losing clinical accuracy, according to  a study by the University of Sheffield.

The research, published in The Lancet Digital Health on 15 February 2026, found that when radiology reports for X-Rays, CT and MRI scans were rewritten using advanced AI systems such as ChatGPT, patients found them almost twice as easy to understand.

Analysis showed that the reading level dropped from “university level” to one more closely aligned with the comprehension of a school pupil aged between 11 and 13.

The findings suggest that AI-assisted explanations could become a standard companion to medical reports, helping to improve transparency and trust across healthcare systems, including the NHS.

Lead author, Dr Samer Alabed, senior clinical research fellow at the University of Sheffield and honorary consultant cardio radiologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The fundamental issue with these reports is they’re not written with patients in mind.

“They are often filled with technical jargon and abbreviations that can easily be misunderstood, leading to unnecessary anxiety, false reassurance and confusion.

“Clinicians frequently have to use valuable appointment time explaining report terminology instead of focusing on care and treatment. Even small-time savings per patient could add up to significant benefits across the NHS.”

📖 What we’re reading

Royal Devon University Healthcare has released a report on its digital journey between 2020 and 2025, outlining its experiences since switching to using an electronic patient record (EPR).

The trust was one of the first in the country to start using an EPR in 2020.

In the report, Royal Devon details how it uses the healthcare app Epic Rover in community settings and how its software build informs the UK configuration, with the Royal Devon team presenting to Epic globally.

Almost 10,000 patients have been able to stay at home and be cared for remotely using wearable devices integrated with the Epic EPR.

More than 230,000 patients now have access to their Royal Devon information using the MY CARE service on their computers or mobile devices and 90% of surveyed patients say that they’re satisfied with the service.

The document also delves into the sustainability benefits of digital tools, claiming that the trust removed around 500,000 letters in one year, saving approximately £450,000 and more than four tonnes of CO2.

🚨 Upcoming events

• 24 and 25 March 2026, Birmingham NEC – Digital Health Rewired