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

🩸Spotlight Pathology, a UK HealthTech company based at UK Research and Innovation’s Daresbury Laboratory campus, has developed AI software that analyses digital pathology images to support clinicians in identifying blood cancers more quickly and consistently. Spotlight’s technology helps pathologists prioritise cases, so that patients can begin treatment earlier.

🤝xWave Technologies, a provider of AI-powered clinical decision support and diagnostic workflow optimisation tools, has announced a strategic partnership with Vertex, a radiology information system provider serving South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The collaboration will bring xWave’s intelligent solutions into Vertex systems to improve imaging referral quality and efficiency across the region.

🧠A Brighton NHS Emergency Medicine consultant has launched a charity that uses AI to analyse vast volumes of biomedical research to identify existing medicines that could potentially be repurposed to treat rare genetic conditions affecting brain development. Professor Rob Galloway launched Rare People – The Research Charity after his daughter was diagnosed with the ultra-rare neurodevelopmental condition DeSanto-Shinawi syndrome.

📞 Business communications provider Britannic Technologies and smart properties solutions provider Vocala, have announced an Amazon Alexa smart voice and telephony solution for adult social care. NetX SmartLink allows two-way calls with an identifiable UK number, whereas before calls from fleet managed Alexa devices appeared as unidentifiable US numbers and could not be linked to a resident, room, or property record.

💽Digital-first home healthcare provider Cera has surpassed 300 billion data points, which it says will help transform AI-powered care and global healthcare research for ageing populations. Cera’s teams capture insights into the health and wellbeing of older people in their own homes, such as symptoms, mobility changes, nutrition, hydration, mood, and behavioural signals.

🤳 The Urology cancer team at Airedale Hospital has launched a service for prostate cancer patients that uses robotic process automation to send patients the results of their PSA test, a blood result that’s monitored for patients who have had prostate cancer. Test results are sent by text rather than patients having to attend an appointment. The automation is intended to help the team reduce waiting lists and waiting times for blood tests, increase clinic capacity, and reduce anxiety for patients waiting for results.

❓ Did you know that?

A study, published on 12 March in Frontiers in Nutrition, found that meal plans created with AI models may not always adequately cover necessary nutrients and calorie intake for teens dealing with weight issues.

Researchers in Turkey compared the meal planning abilities of five AI models, prompting them to create meal plans for teenagers trying to lose weight and compared the results against the recommendations of a registered dietician.

Meal plans were made for four 15-year-olds, a boy and girl falling into the overweight percentile and a boy and girl falling into the obese percentile.

Dr Ayşe Betül Bilen, assistant professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Istanbul Atlas University, said: “We show that diet plans generated by AI models tend to substantially underestimate total energy and key nutrient intake when compared to guideline-based plans prepared by a dietitian.

“Following such unbalanced or overly restrictive meal plans during the teenage years may negatively affect growth, metabolic health, and eating behaviours.”

📖 What we’re reading

Experts at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have explored the opportunities and challenges the NHS faces as AI assistants grow in popularity.

The blog post, published on 12 March, claims that intelligent navigation could “become the greatest threat to the founding principles of the NHS, should the system fail to engage”.

The authors outline how general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT could become the default first point of contact for health concerns despite being unregulated and market-oriented.

“The NHS has a choice: it can ignore this shift and watch platform capture accelerate, or it can engage strategically and shape how these tools work safely, effectively and within a universal health-care context.

“If the NHS engages, it could lean into the technology and add to the consumer experience. It could feed in real-time information about which A&E departments are full or which have the shortest wait.

“Intelligent navigation isn’t a nice-to-have digital upgrade: it’s the battleground on which the future of the NHS will be decided.

“Either the NHS disrupts itself and maintains control of the front door, or big tech will do the disrupting and the NHS will find itself locked out of its relationship with the people it was created to serve,” the report says.

🚨 Upcoming events

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