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

💊 NEUVIOR Pharmaceuticals has been awarded more than £99,000 in SMART: SCOTLAND funding from Scottish Enterprise to support the development of PHARMORIS, an AI-enabled medicines intelligence and deployment programme. The funding will support a nine-month feasibility study exploring how AI can help the NHS more efficiently identify, assess, and deploy high-value generic medicine opportunities.

👂 Ear and hearing health technology provider TympaHealth has secured a £2m Innovate UK loan for the development of AI-powered guidance platform Tympa Assist. TympaHealth integrates high-definition digital otoscopy, AI-assisted image capture and wax assessment, hearing screening, microsuction capability, and cloud-based referral pathways into a single, connected platform.

👾 Patients recovering from brain and spinal cord injuries may soon benefit from virtual reality rehabilitation delivered at their hospital bedside, according to a study led by researchers from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Leeds in partnership with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. The early-stage study explored whether VR technology could help patients practice rehabilitation exercises earlier and more often after serious injury or surgery.

📆 Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has completed a data-driven medical workforce planning programme in partnership with workforce optimisation specialists SARD. The insights helped to identify where the trust needs to address gaps in under-resourced services, and rebalancing in other areas.

👫 Virilitas Labs has launched an app to lead the change in men’s reproductive health and to improve their reproductive well-being. The Virilitas app provides users with personalised guidance based on their lifestyle and health behaviours, alongside support through a medically-informed AI assistant. Users can also access evidence-based content to better understand their reproductive health.

❓ Did you know that?

Figures released by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) show an increase in the number of participants in global and European life sciences trials.

In the 2025-2026 financial year, the number of these ‘firsts’ reached 100, compared to 53 reported in 2024-2025. The data also shows average set-up time for commercial clinical trials has fallen to 122 days, down from 169 days last year.

This performance brings the UK closer to the government’s ‘150-day’ target, the NIHR claims, which aims to ensure 95% of clinical trials are set up and ready to recruit participants within 150 days or fewer.

📖 What we’re reading

The technology to address delayed discharge must be used in a coordinated, system-wide way, write Christos Vasilakis, founding director of the Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Improvement, and Dr Zehra Onen Dumlu, research assistant at the University of Bath.

Read the full piece on digitalhealth.net here.

🚨 Upcoming events

10-11 June 2026, Manchester Central – NHS ConfedExpo

16-17 July 2026, University of Nottingham – Digital Health Summer Schools