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

👨‍✈️ Microsoft has announced that is rolling out an AI health assistant in the US, designed to help people manage their well-being using their medical data. Copilot Health is part of the tech giant’s Copilot app and uses health records, wearable data, and health history to give advice.

🩺 AI care management and life sciences platform Sanius Health has acquired Switzerland-based Kielo Research. The acquisition aims to enhance Sanius Health’s capabilities in integrating patient perspectives into the development of medicines, medical technologies, and healthcare services. It will also expand the platform’s expertise across a broad set of therapeutic areas.

🔬 The Scottish Labour party has pledged that it would roll out AI-enabled scanners and expand the diagnostic workforce in a bid to improve Scotland’s diagnostic services. The Royal College of Radiologists welcomed the announcement, which it said help patients get vital scans faster.

🔒 Imprivata, a provider of access management solutions, has introduced capabilities designed to help NHS organisations and UK healthcare providers meet the evolving compliance, cybersecurity, and data protection landscape. Imprivata Enterprise Access Management now offers facial recognition, AI-powered behavioural analytics, and high-assurance identity verification.

🧬 British biotech firm Ternary Therapeutics has raised £3.6m in seed funding to scale an AI platform designed to create ‘molecular glue’ drugs. Molecular glues are small drug molecules that force two proteins inside a cell to stick together. They can switch off harmful proteins or restore lost function, which could treat diseases that have defeated traditional drug discovery.

🔎Healthcare provider, LivingCare Group has been selected as the proposed imaging partner for the IMProVE clinical trial, a prostate cancer early-detection programme funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research. The study aims to establish whether a combined approach using blood tests and MRI scans could detect prostate cancer earlier, save lives, and be implemented in a way that addresses health inequalities.

❓ Did you know that?

Overall representation of women in leadership positions has stalled across the UK biotech sector, according a report, published on 4 March by BioIndustry Association (BIA).

‘Women in Biotech Leadership: one year on‘ warns that the UK biotech industry is battling growing political rhetoric that threatens both progress in diversity, equity, and inclusion and global health initiatives.

It reports that representation at CEO level has moved from 18.3% to 18.7% from 2024, a marginal gain that signals a plateau, while representation in technical leadership remains the lowest across C-suite roles, with CTO representation at 14% and CSO at 20%.

While capital raised by women increased to 15% (up from 8% in 2024), this growth is highly concentrated. If the top three Series A deals are removed, the female representation in total capital raised drops to just 6%.

Jane Wall, managing director at BIA, said: “One year ago, we identified the structural barriers. Today, we are calling out the lack of progress.

“2025 has been a year of caution and strategic maturation for the UK biotech sector, and female leaders have remained successful despite the fight against a new political current.”

The analysis is based on data on UK-headquartered companies in January 2026, classified under biotechnology, discovery tools (healthcare), drug delivery, drug discovery, and pharmaceuticals.

📖 What we’re reading

A Substack article, published on 2 March by Dr Benn Gooch, a GP and member of the RCGP Informatics Group, explains why he decided to stop using ambient voice technology (AVT).

In ‘I was an enthusiastic early adopter of AI scribes. Here’s why I stopped‘ Gooch outlines risks of allowing a machine to handle documentation for GP consultations.

He writes that he began to allow consultations to grow longer to fill whatever space the patient needed, because everything would be recorded and reviewed.

“The question I want to pose is not whether these tools offer something real – they do – but whether we are paying a price we haven’t yet noticed.

“What I was actually doing was offloading the work of clinical curation – one of the most cognitively demanding and clinically important things a GP does – to the post-consultation review process.

“And that review process was mine alone, unsupported, often done at the end of a surgery already running 30 minutes over.

“I was left with too many problems documented to manage, too many loose threads to follow up, and a creeping sense of clinical overextension that I initially attributed to patient complexity rather than a change in my own behaviour.”

🚨 Upcoming events

• 28 April 2026, Online – Understanding the NHS Management and Leadership Framework in Practice