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

🏆 Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust’s adoption of digital tools to improve patient care and free up clinical time has been recognised with an award. The trust won Patient Engagement & Experience Initiative of the Year, in partnership with AI company Quantium Health, at the HSJ Partnership Awards 2026.

🧬 Scientists have developed an AI-powered technique to determine which patients with advanced bowel cancer are most likely to respond to a drug used by the NHS. A team at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, have developed a method to identify patients most likely to benefit from bevacizumab, which slows the growth of cancer but only works for a small group of patients and carries the risk of serious side effects.

📱 Rippl, the employee recognition, reward, and benefits platform, has announced a partnership with virtual primary care provider Doctor Care Anywhere. This collaboration will give employees across the UK mobile access to GP, advanced clinical practitioner, physiotherapy, and mental health appointments, expanding clinical support for deskless and decentralised workforces.

💃 Pharmacy2U has announced a year-long lead sponsorship of ITV panel show Loose Women. The online pharmacy says the programme, which has around 2.3 million viewers a week, has a key focus on promoting awareness of health issues, including mental health, weight loss, and the menopause, adding: “We hope to… encourage more stigma-free discussions about health into the mainstream.”

👨‍⚕️ Independent healthcare group Spire Healthcare has invested in AI-enabled MRI scanners in 21 of its hospitals. The investment supports patients and consultants by providing sharper images, improving diagnostic confidence and speeding up the MRI process. Scan times for certain orthopaedic MRI studies, for example knees, have halved from around 30 to 15 minutes, while scan rates have increased from 1.9 to 2.3 per hour.

❓ Did you know that?

Prisoners across the UK and Wales say laptops designed for offline learning are helping improve their mental health, education, and rehabilitation, according to feedback released ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week (11-17 May).

The comments, released by educational technology company Coracle, highlights how access to offline-first learning tools is giving prisoners structure, purpose, and a way to study in environments with limited access to education.

The laptops do not rely on internet access but provide educational courses, resources, and tools for writing, assignments, and qualifications, including Open University study.

One prisoner said the device was a “vital tool towards my rehabilitation and education”, while others said it had “helped with my mental health” and provided a “positive and constructive outlet” during extended periods spent in cells”.

📖 What we’re reading

Researchers claim AI large language models (LLMs) fail to produce an appropriate early diagnosis more than 80% of the time, suggesting they cannot yet be relied on for unsupervised clinical decision-making.

Researchers at Mass General Brigham, a non-profit hospital and research network in the US city of Boston, evaluated 21 LLMs, including 2025 releases of reasoning models such as GPT-5, Grok 4, and Gemini 3.0 Pro, using standardised clinical reports.

The study, published on April 13 in the JAMA Network Open medical journal, found that all tested LLMs arrived at a correct final diagnosis more than 90% of the time when provided with all pertinent information in a patient case, but consistently performed poorly at the earlier, reasoning-driven steps of the diagnostic process.

“Despite continued improvements, off-the-shelf large language models are not ready for unsupervised clinical-grade deployment,” said corresponding author Dr Marc Succi, executive director of the MESH Incubator at Mass General Brigham.

“Differential diagnoses are central to clinical reasoning and underlie the ‘art of medicine’ that AI cannot currently replicate. The promise of AI in clinical medicine continues to lie in its potential to augment, not replace, physician reasoning, provided all the relevant data is available—not always the case.”

Analyses were performed from January to December 2025.

🚨 Upcoming events

• 28 April 2026, Online – Understanding the NHS Management and Leadership Framework in Practice
• 13 May 2026 – Bristol NHS Group’s Local Health Tech Showcase
• 21 May 2026, Online – Scaling excellence through digital pathway standardisation