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

🏡 A ‘hospital at home’ service run by Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been expanded to enable frail patients to access hospital-level care in their own homes. The service aims to reduce hospital admissions, and the care includes IV therapy, blood tests and electrocardiogram monitoring. Patients are managed by a multidisciplinary team of hospital consultants, advanced clinical practitioners, pharmacists, nurses, health care assistants, therapists, and other specialist staff.

🚑A Scottish Ambulance Service pilot of a volunteer responder app has resulted in a boost to community emergency response, paving the way for a Scotland-wide rollout. Run between November 2025 and February 2026, the pilot saw volunteer response to incidents increase by more than 36%, enabling 786 more patients to receive vital assistance. The trial also resulted in improved response times due to more accurate geographical information provided by the app.

🦴Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust is preparing to procure an AI-driven digital physiotherapy service, designed to provide a full alternative to traditional musculoskeletal care pathways. The trust is seeking a UK-based supplier capable of delivering an end-to-end clinical pathway, where AI intelligence is the primary driver of care. The service must function as a standalone solution and will be expected to handle the entire patient journey.

📂The Department of Health and Social Care has awarded a £1.25m contract to Marvell Consulting, a software development company, to replace the Fingertips public health data collection service. The service, which will run until March 2027, is at the minimum viable product and will deliver a public beta ‘Find Public Health Data’ service on GOV.UK.

💻NHS Grampian has pinpointed 12 digital priority programmes for delivery or ‘substantial progression’ in 2026/27. They include child health, the MyCare digital front door, theatre scheduling, the Laboratory Information Management System, digital infrastructure, and Windows 10 replacement. The board says digital capability is essential to supporting performance improvement and organisational recovery.

👀The Welsh Government says it will have achieved the digital foundations to modernise eye care services by the end of this month. The Digital Eye Care programme supports closer links between hospital ophthalmology and primary care optometry under the Wales General Ophthalmic Services framework and provides the digital infrastructure needed to support workforce resilience, improve patient flow, and manage clinical risk appropriately.

❓ Did you know that?

Data released by the Office for National Statistics shows nine in 10 patients rate some NHS community services highly but are still struggling to access them when they need to.

The latest UK patient experience analysis, published on 26 March, found that 84.6% of respondees said their experience of NHS community services was good. A total of 92.1% were positive about district and community nursing, and 91.1% were positive about rehabilitation services.

However, patients reporting bad experiences, such as long waits, cancelled or delayed appointments, and difficulty booking care showed the same pattern across services, particularly for physiotherapy and musculoskeletal care.

Matt Hall, SME director of medical insurer MyHealthPal, said: “This is a breath of fresh air. People are not walking away from the NHS; they are worn down by long waits, by chasing appointments, and by not knowing what will happen next.

“My worry is not that the care is poor, but that good care is reaching people too late.”

📖 What we’re reading

The Labour Research Department, an independent trade union-based research organisation, claims that unions have expressed wariness over plans to shift from “analogue to digital” in the NHS 10 year health plan.

A blog post, published on 7 April, says: “Worryingly, however, the plan’s drive to adopt new technologies insufficiently considers data and healthcare ethics, or moderation of expectations from untested technologies.

“It criticises the NHS for having been a risk-averse ‘poor partner’ to ‘industry and innovators’ and promises ‘faster and at-scale real-world evaluations of AI’, which will enable, for example, the use of  wearables as ‘your personal health custodians’; ‘personalised health risk scores on the NHS App, drawing from genomic, demographic and lifestyle data’; and an AI ‘doctor in your pocket’ for each patient’.

“This has driven many unions and clinicians’ professional membership bodies, such as UNISON, RCN, BMA, the Royal College of Radiographers and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, to warn that these technologies must not replace clinicians, and must be properly clinically tested before they are adopted, as well as respect data protection and healthcare ethics principles.”

🚨 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