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

🩸 Roche Diagnostics has announced that its Accu-Chek SmartGuide continuous glucose monitoring system, which helps adults with diabetes predict dangerous drops in blood sugar, is now reimbursable on the NHS. The first NHS organisations to offer access to the device include Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board, and NHS Somerset Integrated Care Board.

👩‍💻 Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has deployed augmented reality technology to enhance care for women undergoing endometriosis surgery. Large-scale, anatomically precise 3D models helps clinicians explain diagnoses and disease progression to patients more clearly, while supporting patients who want to understand what is happening inside their bodies.

🍏 Apple’s App Store is requiring developers to declare if their app is classified as a regulated medical device in the US, UK or EU. Apps in the health and fitness or medical categories must declare their regional medical accreditation, instructions for use, and safety information. New apps must comply with the tech giant’s new rules immediately and existing apps have until early 2027 to fulfil the obligation.

🚨Lancashire-based social housing provider Progress Housing Group has announced a digital telecare equipment upgrade for 512 of its independent living homes for people over the age of 55. The Everon Group is responsible for completing the contract, which will run for up to three years until January 2029, for a digital cloud-based telecare solution that continuously monitors signals from units in each home and communal area.

💵 UK health technology startup Doc Abode, has secured growth funding via NatWest’s High Growth IP-backed loan for the next phase of a national expansion of its web portal and smartphone app. Doc Abode supports urgent community response and wider out-of-hospital urgent care pathways by giving teams real-time visibility of workforce capacity and demand.

➰ Shares in digital health company MedPal AI rose 12% after the launch of its closed-loop digital health operating system in the UK. The technology integrates wearable data, AI triage, clinician-led prescribing, and robotic dispensing into one platform. The MedPal Health OS aggregates real-time physiological data from wearable devices and health apps, including Apple Health, Whoop, and Garmin.

❓ Did you know that?

Scientists have loaded a complete genome onto a quantum computer, heralded as a major step towards using quantum computing to tackle some of biology’s most complex bioinformatic challenges.

The genome was loaded onto an IBM quantum computer as part of a ‘world first’ collaboration between the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Melbourne, and Kyiv Academic University.

The goal of the Quantum Pangenomics project was to perform a range of genomic processing tasks for the most complex and variable genomes and sequences, a task that can go beyond the capabilities of current computers, including the use of AI.

These tasks include assembling genomes and pangenomes from DNA sequence data, as well as mapping DNA fragments into reference genomes, which is key for studying genetic variation.

The team completed the milestone as part of the Quantum for Bio Challenge, an international research programme funded by Wellcome Leap. The challenge aims to accelerate the applications of quantum computing in human health, which may pave the way for faster tracking of infectious disease, deepen understanding of genetic disorders, and identify disease-causing mutations with greater accuracy.

📖 What we’re reading

A global patient safety organisation has named AI diagnostic risks as the main patient safety concern for 2026.

The core issue highlighted by ECRI’s 2026 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns report, published on 9 March, is ‘automation bias’ where the human clinician is psychologically primed to agree with an AI diagnostic system.

The report highlights that the risk of missed, delayed, or incorrect diagnoses is increased if these systems are deployed without clinical oversight and warns that AI models are only as reliable as the data on which they are trained.

“If an algorithm is trained on historical data that contains demographic biases, deploying that AI at scale will only serve to automate and worsen existing health disparities,” the report states.

🚨 Upcoming events

• 28 April 2026, Online – Understanding the NHS Management and Leadership Framework in Practice
• 21 May 2026, Online – Scaling excellence through digital pathway standardisation