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

🦷 Oldham Council has awarded Manchester start-up My Dental Buddy a two-year contract worth £248,000 for the provision of its oral health programme. The platform offers a live dashboard for supervising teeth brushing, interactive brushing guides, and dentist-approved educational content to reinforce healthy routines.

📝 Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust and Norfolk Community and Health Care are set to procure a digital physiotherapy clinic including AI support for triage and diagnosis, at an estimated total value of £2 million. A contract notice is expected to be published around 2 March 2026, offering a three-year initial term with options to extend for a further two years.

👩‍⚕️ Liverpool City Council is planning to “reshape” its adult social care offering with a procurement for the provision of tech-enabled care (TEC) for adult social care services. A tender notice is expected to be published in May 2026 which will see the council move to a “TEC first” approach, “transitioning from a traditional telecare model to a flexible, innovative, data‑driven TEC ecosystem”.

🚀 MedPal AI has launched a UK healthcare platform that links its AI-powered triage and wellness app with human-validated prescribing and robotic pharmacy dispensing. The model is designed to capture revenue at multiple points per patient through app subscriptions, NHS dispensing fees, private prescriptions and clinical consultation charges, creating economies of scale as usage grows.

🤝 The Welsh Blood Service (WBS) has awarded a £6.5m contract to Italian firm GPI Spa for the delivery and maintenance of a new Blood Establishment Computer System, replacing its ageing IT infrastructure. The new system, procured by Velindre University NHS Trust on behalf of WBS, is designed to support the service key roles, including the collection, processing, and distribution of blood products across Wales.

🚨 Chatbot misuse is ranked the top health technology hazard for 2026, according to US patient safety organisation ECRI. ECRI compiled its annual top 10 from member surveys, literature reviews, medical device testing and investigations of patient safety incidents. It concluded that large language models are built to keep users engaged rather than challenge flawed assumptions in a query. They can also make mistakes or hallucinate information and often sound definitive instead of acknowledging uncertainty.

❓ Did you know that?

Tim Flagg, chief executive of UKAI, the UK’s AI trade body, has said that Britain’s tech industry should adopt a pragmatic approach to sovereign AI that actively backs British AI businesses, giving them clearer routes to scale, win contracts and compete internationally, while retaining control over critical capabilities and continuing to work with global technology partners.

Speaking after a parliamentary roundtable at the House of Lords, said the UK’s competitive advantage lies in pairing strong domestic capability with openness: ensuring UK firms are not locked out of their own market, while remaining deeply integrated into global AI supply chains.

In November 2025, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called for UK companies to be prioritised for big NHS technology contracts, rather than US giants such as Microsoft and Palantir.

📖 What we’re reading

An article, published in npj Digital Medicine on 11 February 2026, provides insights from the multidisciplinary authorship team’s experience working with international regulatory databases, informed by their recent research and expertise.

‘Current challenges and the way forwards for regulatory databases of artificial intelligence as a medical device’ identified four key challenges in navigating regulatory databases: limited search functionality, no specific terminology for identification of AI as a medical device, limited transparency, and data fragmentation across multiple databases.

🚨 Upcoming events

21 February 2026, online – Next steps for AI in UK healthcare – development, regulation and implementation – Westminster Health Forum policy conference