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

🖥 The United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has installed two Canon imaging systems to strengthen its interventional radiology service. The move is a response to rising demand for minimally invasive procedures and the challenge of delivering specialist care across a largely rural county. The Alphenix Core+ and the Alphenix Sky+ support faster diagnoses, shorter hospital stays, and reduce the need for referrals outside the region, the trust claims.

🫃 A Midlands medical start-up has secured a £1.6 million award to trial technology that can interpret what is going on inside people’s digestive systems. Ademen has received a National Institute for Health and Care Research award to test the safety and effectiveness of its acoustic gut monitoring device, which captures and analyses bowel activity patterns to provide data on gut health.

👶 Safer Birth has launched Fit4Labour, a risk calculator that helps clinicians quickly identify babies at higher risk of harm in labour. The tech draws on decades of research at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health and used data from a database of more than 71,000 births. Fit4Labour delivers a risk assessment at the onset of labour and potentially enables clinicians to plan around a difficult birth and avoid risky emergency procedures.

📋 A total of 79 Scotland-based medtech companies have moved closer to international regulatory approval with guidance from Heriot-Watt University’s Medical Device Manufacturing Centre (MDMC). The innovations range from respiratory devices to help children with cystic fibrosis breathe more easily to pockets designed to absorb leaks from stoma bags. The MDMC provides free, specialist advice on medical device regulations to life science SMEs across Scotland.

⌛ Pregnancy and postnatal wellbeing app Carea has launched a contraction timer designed to support women during labour through a combination of contraction tracking, labour pattern analysis, and wellbeing tools. While contraction timers are among the most used digital tools during labour, many only track timings and offer little additional support. Carea’s contraction timer has been developed to help women feel calmer and able to make informed decisions as labour progresses.

❓ Did you know that?

SonicWall has released data it claims reveals a targeted surge in cyber attacks against the UK healthcare sector. According to SonicWall’s Threat Research team, the UK healthcare sector recorded 264,000 individual intrusion prevention system events in the first five months of 2026 alone, up from a full-year total of 27,000 in 2025.

This traffic increase represents a per-device attack intensity of approximately 11,000 events per sensor. No other industries or sectors in Britain come close to this per-device intensity, establishing healthcare as the nation’s most targeted industry, according to SonicWall.

Spencer Starkey, executive vice president EMEA at SonicWall, said: “Our data indicated ransomware volumes dropped a sharp 87% in 2025 across UK businesses as ‘big game hunters’ traded volume for precision, going after fewer targets with bigger payloads. Healthcare didn’t get that memo. Attackers are targeting our hospitals, and stress-testing them to breaking points.

“This is a double-edged crisis. Zombie tech, ancient unpatched systems, and legacy Java keeps haunting the NHS because administrators can’t just take a critical care system offline to patch it.

“Meanwhile, the rush to digitise has opened the door to brand-new web vulnerabilities in patient portals. Threat actors have clocked the gap between old and new, and they’re scanning for it relentlessly.”

📖 What we’re reading

A new AI model called COMPASS uses tumour gene expression data to predict which patients will respond to cancer immunotherapy drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs).

The model, developed by Harvard Medical School researchers and their colleagues, improves prediction of which patients are most likely to respond to ICIs.

Using data from patients treated in the past, the model outperformed the best existing approaches by eight per cent. It makes its predictions based on patients’ tumour gene activity and provides a rationale for its output.

Researchers claim that if these results are validated in a future clinical trial, COMPASS could lead to better personalised medicine for cancer patients, more efficient trial enrollment for therapies, and new drug targets for researchers to explore.

This study is a computational analysis using deidentified datasets and was published in Nature Medicine on 3 July 2026.

🚨 Upcoming events

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