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 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has opened a consultation on proposed updates to its HealthTech programme manual. The manual sets out the methods used when developing vital HealthTech guidance and includes new approaches for developing guidance for products already being used within the NHS. Responses are invited up to 5pm 4 September 2025.

🩻 Medical imaging specialist Adaptix Ltd has announced an exclusive distribution agreement with Vertec Scientific Ltd UK. The move will see Vertec appointed as the official UK distributor for the Adaptix Orthopaedic 3D imaging system, which provides orthopaedic surgeons with more detailed, higher-resolution 3D images.

📝US software giant Epic is rumoured to be planning to launch its own AI scribe to transcribe doctors’ notes. The company posted a video on 6 August 2025 which highlighted its AI charting capabilities.

♀️ A new collaboration will combine digital hormone intelligence from Tuune with Weldricks Pharmacy’s dispending to deliver personalised contraception online. The partnership aims to give women safer access to contraception tailored to their unique biology and symptoms.

💷  Three West Yorkshire-base HealthTech companies have been announced as finalists in the £1 million Mayor’s big ideas challenge. MAGI, an AI platform, offering accessible tools to neurodivergent women to navigate burnout; the West Yorkshire DPP Support and Prescribing Support Platform, which offers training, mentorship and peer support for pharmacists; and Polly, an AI-powered speech and language platform to help children develop communication skills, will each receive £20,000 to help bring their tech to life.

🤖 CardioPrecision has executed the first clinical case of robotic aortic valve replacement through a small incision in the neck. It follows on from last year’s proof of concept AVATAR procedure and surgery on human cadavers using its CoreVista Robot Enabling Platform. The company was originally spun out of the NHS through InnoScot Health.

❓Did you know?

Research by the firm Modat found that data from 1.2 million healthcare devices and systems are exposed online, including more than 77,000 devices and systems in Great Britain. This places Great Britain in the top 10 countries with the highest number of vulnerable devices.

The analysis found that many internet-connected devices, ranging from MRI machines to systems storing blood test results, are poorly secured with security vulnerabilities or misconfigurations or lack proper authentication.

It said that the issue stems from misconfigured systems and outdated software, which can allow anyone with basic tools to access highly sensitive information including patient names, diagnoses and detailed scans.

📖 What we’re reading

The government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan has highlighted synthetic data as an area a potential solution that would allow for the sharing of privacy-preserving versions of highly sensitive data, such as NHS health data

An analysis of NHS England’s failed care.data platform, authored by Sahar Abdulrahman and Markus Trengove, offers key recommendations for future synthetic data initiatives in healthcare.

The paper, published on 9 August 2025 in Nature’s npj digital medicine, highlights criticism of the care.data scheme for its inadequate and exclusionary consent process.

For future synthetic data projects to succeed, the authors argue that they must address the three core issues that contributed to care.data’s failure: confidentiality, consent and transparency.

The paper suggests that to combat public and professional concerns over the risk of re-identification, synthetic data initiatives must use privacy metrics to categorise datasets into low, medium and high-risk categories.

Low-risk data would have fewer restrictions, while high-risk data would require the same stringent safeguards as real-world data, such as Trusted Research Environments (TREs).

Also, it says that future synthetic data initiatives must engage meaningfully with patients, ensuring they understand the risks and benefits.

The authors argue that a lack of transparency about who would access NHS data was a major factor in care.data’s abandonment.

They recommend that synthetic data initiatives must be clear about their intended users and ensure that any commercial access is vetted for public benefit with a designated public body within the NHS, rather than a private company, responsible for creating and managing access to data.

🚨Upcoming events

22 August 2025, online event – Digital nursing and the 10 year plan