Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕
- 10 February 2026
Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.
👇 News
🖥 Patients at James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Norfolk will get a digital bedside service with integrated technology that supports entertainment, communication, and access to hospital services. The terminals from Airwave Healthcare are being introduced on the trust’s Concept Ward as part of the Future Paget Programme to redesign clinical services.
🐲 Smoke Free, an app that helps smokers to quit, has launched a virtual dragon companion designed to distract users from cravings and build new habits. The Dragon is a gamified companion that uses evidence-backed behavioural science and research from Smoke Free conducted in partnership with the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University.
🧬 More than 1,000 expectant parents at the Jessop Wing specialist maternity unit in Sheffield have signed up to a study helping to detect rare genetic illnesses in babies. The Generation study is being led nationally by Genomics England in partnership with NHS England and aims to screen 100,000 newborn babies in England using whole genome sequencing for more than 200 rare genetic conditions.
🏴☠️ HealthTech PR and communications agency Silver Buck has announced four new members to its advisory board, the Silver Buccaneers. It welcomes Matt Hancock, former health secretary, Dr Umang Patel, chief clinical medical officer at Microsoft, Trishna Bharadia, founder of The Spark Global, and Malte Gerhold, former director of innovation and improvement at The Health Foundation.
💰 Spanish healthtech company Biorce, which specialises in applying AI to the design and execution of clinical trials, has received $52 million in capital funding. The financing includes new investment from DST Global Partners, with existing investors Norrsken VC and YZR Capital increasing their participation.
💵The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust announced that it has delivered online adaptive radiotherapy on an Elekta linear accelerator using RaySearch’s advanced adaptive tools. This type of radiotherapy allows for highly precise, targeted treatment. It can help to minimise damage to surrounding healthy tissue and reduce patient side effects.
❓ Did you know that?
A study found that delivery of magnetic energy to the brain is a cost-effective treatment option for patients with depression.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), is an outpatient treatment in which magnetic pulses are delivered to the left side of patient’s head to treat moderate and severe forms of depression that have not responded to other treatments.
The person is conscious and has at least 20 sessions over a four-to-six-week period.
An economic analysis, published in BMJ Mental Health on 26 January 2026, comparing TMS to usual care in specialist mental health services, found that TMS reduces depressive symptoms, eases pressures on informal carers and on NHS resources, and helps people get back to work.
📖 What we’re reading
The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) has published a report ‘Towards a National Care Service: raising national standards of care’, supported by The Access Group.
It argues that the core challenge facing social care is not a lack of values or vision, but the inconsistent translation of those shared principles into people’s day-to-day experiences of care and support.
The report says that people’s access to support, the quality of care they experience, and the outcomes they achieve continue to vary significantly depending on where they live and how local systems operate, creating a ‘postcode lottery’ of care.
SCIE’s proposed framework sets out how national standards could define what is essential and non-negotiable, while deliberately protecting flexibility in how outcomes are achieved locally.
Kathryn Marsden, chief executive of SCIE, said: “As the Casey Commission builds momentum towards its final report in 2028, this is the moment to get the foundations right – starting with clarity about what good care should deliver, and how we reduce variation in people’s experiences without losing what makes care personal and local.”
🚨 This week’s events
