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

🦜 Birdie, the smart technology platform for homecare, has launched SmartPlans, an AI-powered care assessment tool that records, transcribes, and surfaces draft assessment answers of a conversation. When assessors open the assessment in Birdie, the suggested answers are already there, cited to the relevant moment in the transcript and ready to review.

🕋 Doctify, a platform for healthcare reviews and patient feedback, has launched in Saudi Arabia. The platform gives patients access to verified reviews and peer-to-peer endorsements, helping them make decisions about where to seek care. The platform also offers structured, real-time patient feedback for healthcare providers.

💡 A new NHS 111 self-referral tool for breast cancer from Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has won the digital innovation award at the inaugural 2026 NHS Excellence Awards at NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester. The trust created a safe ‘digital front door’ for diagnostics for the more than 2,000 people who used it, helping identify 51 cases of cancer.

⚽ Scottish sports technology company ScribePro has signed up 29 World Cup country teams to its digital medical management platform for player welfare. The clinician-led digital medical management system will help support player welfare, injury management, and medical communication throughout the competition.

🛜 Spark TSL and CardMedic have announced a partnership that will see CardMedic’s translation and interpretation software integrated as the clinical communication solution within Spark TSL’s Spark Fusion patient engagement devices. Spark TSL is a supplier of patient entertainment and WiFi infrastructure to the NHS, while CardMedic, a former winner of Digital Health Rewired Pitchfest, is a provider of healthcare patient-provider communication software.

❓ Did you know that?

NHS England has overloaded GPs with new and expanding priorities, with consequences for their ability to support older people, warns a UK government body.

The Public Accounts Committee’s report voices concern that GPs might not be prioritising care for this group, with limited capacity taken up with delivering NHS England’s priorities on improving patients’ access and digital access to general practice.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “Those at risk of frailty need preventative and follow-up care – indeed, the value of this kind of care is so well-established that it is a requirement in GPs’ contracts.

“Yet our report shows that in too many parts of the country GPs are simply unable to do this important work, overloaded as they have been with new and expanding priorities from NHS England.

“NHSE needs to take a long hard look at what it expects from both the wider health system and from GPs, who are only human beings, running already complicated operations, and with limited resources.”

In evidence to the PAC’s inquiry, NHSE recognised that over the years it had pushed GP practices hard to improve access, and that pushing to improve one aspect of care inevitably causes consequences to appear elsewhere – in this case, support for people with frailty.

🎧 What we’re listening to

In the latest episode of Digital Health Unplugged, host Jordan Sollof is joined at NHS ConfedExpo 2026 by Dr Peter Thomas and Kate Warriner for a deep dive into the proposed NHS single patient record (SPR).

The government’s NHS Modernisation Bill includes a requirement for all NHS providers to share patient data to create a SPR, which it says will help join up fragmented health information and improve access to patient records across care settings.

Dr Thomas, director of digital development and consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Warriner, chief transformation and digital officer at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, discuss how a SPR could help both clinicians and patients.

You can watch or listen to the episode here.

🚨 Upcoming events

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