Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕

News

21 May 2026

September 18, 2025

Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.

👇 News

💵 Prema Cognition, a digital health company developing technology for the early detection of dementia, has closed a £550,000 funding round, led by SFC Capital. The funding will support the expansion of clinical datasets to further validate the technology, alongside progress towards regulatory pathways and broader deployment across healthcare and research settings.

🛌 The NHS claims it has hit its target for the number of patients waiting 18 weeks for treatment. In March, 65.3% of patients were waiting 18 weeks, as the waiting list fell by over 312,000 last year, the largest year-on-year reduction in 16 years. The improvement in performance by 6.4% since July 2024 means around 450,000 fewer people were waiting over 18 weeks for NHS treatment in March this year.

🩻 Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust has worked with Harrison.ai, an AI imaging platform, to build a system that automatically reads every chest X-ray the instant it is taken, prioritises the most urgent findings, and flags potential cancers for immediate review. Harrison.AI claims that in several cases the AI identified the abnormality at an earlier X-ray than the one at which it was first clinically reported.

👶 Hull Women and Children’s Hospital has introduced a £12,000 biometric fingerprint access system at its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, paid for by the Baby Unit Fund. People with parental responsibilities for babies undergoing treatment on the 26-cot unit, which is a regional tertiary unit caring for some of the sickest babies in the country, will register their fingerprints on the secure system as soon as their babies are admitted.

📱 Bupa has partnered with YuLife to launch a plan designed to help businesses improve workplace wellbeing, reduce absence, and make it easier for employees to claim back the cost of everyday healthcare services. The ‘Bupa x YuLife Health Cash Plan’ helps employees stay engaged with their health through digital challenges and connects employees to digital healthcare services including online GP appointments and a ‘skin check’ tool for potential skin cancer concerns.

❓ Did you know that?

Northwestern University engineers have developed a small, wireless and wearable polygraph system designed to sense underlying stress hidden deep within the body.

The lightweight, bandage-like device adheres to the chest and measures heart activity, breathing patterns, sweat response, blood flow and temperature. These signals aim to capture a real-time, whole-body view of stress, according to a study published on 13 May in the journal Science Advances.

By continuously tracking multiple physiological signals at once, the device could help clinicians detect stress and potential discomfort in patients who may be unable to communicate, diagnose sleep disorders without in-laboratory equipment, monitor mental health over time, and even sense early warning signs of medical complications.

📖 What we’re reading

Phesi, a provider of patient-centric data science solutions for clinical development, has conducted a global analysis of more than 600,000 clinical trial protocols and found that fewer than one in three (29.3%) protocols are linked to publicly documented patient data and outcomes.

Researchers say this trend is consistent across oncology trials, where just 30.9% of 116,746 protocols are linked to usable patient data. With historical protocols often used as the basis for future trial design, the findings highlight a significant risk of flawed decision-making in clinical development, the authors claim.

As part of its analysis, Phesi conducted further analysis into breast cancer over the past five years. Despite the scale and maturity of research in breast cancer, just 31.2% of 15,977 protocols are linked to trials with usable patient data.

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