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

🌿Medical cannabis provider Curaleaf International has announced the launch of the Curaleaf Education Platform, providing access to accredited medical cannabis training programmes for healthcare professionals across the UK. The platform delivers a structured learning framework across foundational science, core clinical knowledge and specialist therapeutic areas. Medical cannabis has been legal since 2018 and there are now more than 60,000 UK patients accessing medical cannabis on prescription.

⚙ InHealth has introduced the helium-independent MAGNETOM Flow Elite MRI system from Siemens Healthineers to Great Britain and Ireland. The system was developed to simplify installation requirements and reduce reliance on scarce resources by reducing helium consumption by up to 99% compared with conventional MRI systems.

👨‍⚕️Healthcare education provider Pastest has acquired Medics’ Money, a financial platform for doctors as part of its ambition into a broader healthcare career platform. The move reflects a broader trend across healthtech, where healthcare professionals increasingly seek trusted digital platforms that support multiple aspects of their professional development rather than standalone educational products, Pastest claims.

🪜 Ladder Health, a paediatric developmental care company, has announced the close of an $7 million seed financing round led by Nina Capital. Ladder Health delivers speech, occupational, physical and feeding therapy through a virtual-first, AI-enabled platform available evenings and weekends. The funding will support expansion across the US and continue investment in Ladder Health’s AI-enabled care platform and health system partnerships.

🧎‍♂️ Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, are collaborating on a system to estimate metabolic cost prediction for evaluating movement efficiency to improve performance or rehabilitation. The team will use ENABLE, an SwRI-developed motion capture technology, musculoskeletal modelling, and machine learning to improve metabolic cost prediction for healthcare.

❓ Did you know that?

techUK has launched a new flagship white paper: ‘Why digital adult social care transformation is central to the future of the NHS’, setting out why adult social care must sit at the heart of NHS reform and how the technology to deliver it is already here.

The paper argues that the NHS 10-Year Plan’s three strategic shifts, hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention, all depend on what happens in people’s homes and neighbourhoods, where adult social care already operates at scale.

The technologies needed to support that shift, predictive monitoring, interoperable records, AI-enabled decision support and digital telecare, are mature and already deployed.

What is missing, the paper argues, is the coordination layer around them: aligned commissioning, consolidated data standards, joined-up assurance, stronger interoperability and shared accountability across health, care, government and industry.

📖 What we’re reading

Beth Rush, a correspondent at the Journal of Medical Internet Research, has written on the issue of equity and inclusivity being possible in AI-enabled health care.

The article, published on 22 June 2026, tackles the fundamental problem of ‘invisible populations’ in health care AI systems, which are typically trained on data generated through existing care pathways.

Rush writes: “This creates a fundamental problem: populations who face barriers to accessing care are not appropriately reflected in the datasets used to build these tools.

“The groups most at risk include people with unstable housing, migrants and refugees, individuals with disabilities, those living in rural or remote areas, caregivers of older adults, people with low digital access, and patients with complex multimorbidity.

“When AI models are developed using incomplete or unrepresentative data, they risk systematically underserving the populations who need care most,” she adds.

🚨 Upcoming events

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