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

🫀 Pharmacy2U and PocDoc are sending free cholesterol testing kits to 10,000 Pharmacy2U customers, which allow patients to assess their risk of cardiovascular disease in under 10 minutes at home. If results indicate customers would benefit from intervention, they’ll be invited to join a six-to-eight-week programme including online pharmacist consultation, personalised advice and support to control cholesterol levels.

💷 Eight of the UK’s most promising cardiovascular health startups are competing for up to £250K investment in a six-week business development programme. The Discovery Spark programme is run by Discovery Park in Kent, and the cohort includes Coblum, a tech company developing the world’s first fully-automated resuscitation device and digital HealthTech startup Persis Health Innovation.

👶 BoobyBiome has raised £2.5m to speed up the development and commercial launch of a patented storage device that protects the microbiome, antioxidants and vitamins of expressed milk, and a live microbiome supplement drop to support babies that are formula-fed. Specialist deep tech investor Empirical Ventures led the seed round.

♀️  Zepp Health has acquired the core assets and intellectual property of women’s health platform Wild.AI. The acquisition builds on a previous collaboration from earlier this year, which saw Wild.AI launch a mini app on AmazFit’s Active 2 smartwatch, of which Zepp Health is the parent company.

🧑‍⚕️Digital dermatology platform Miiskin has received a $200,000 (£148,000) grant from the Danish Innovation Fund to advance AI integration and improve dermatology providers’ workflows. The funding will be used to support the use of GenAI within the platform to help streamline non-clinical workflow tasks, organise patient-submitted information and reduce admin tasks.

❓Did you know?

Poor communication from healthcare professionals could negatively impact patients’ mental health, according to a survey commissioned by Semble, published on 15 September 2025.

The survey, which sought the opinion of 2,000 UK patients, found that 61% of respondents reported that their mental health had been affected for the worse as a result of unclear, inconsistent or delayed communication.

Additionally, patients revealed that they felt uncomfortable raising information they’d found online with their clinician – with 38% agreeing, highlighting a significant gap in trust between the clinician-patient relationship.

The survey also asked what patients felt would improve patient safety and top of the list was the ability to ask questions at any time (63%). Access to medical information on demand (51%), clear guidance on side effects (51%) and timely reminders about follow-up care (44%) were also highlighted as being important.

When tasked with identifying clear priorities for making healthcare safer over the next five years, better staffing levels was the key priority, with 26% calling for more staff in order to reduce workload and minimise errors.

Using technology to enable earlier detection of issues was favoured by 18%, followed by improving patient-staff communication through digital tools (16%).

🎧 What we’re listening to

Dr Penny Kechagioglou, chair of the Digital Health Networks Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) Advisory Panel, discusses the issue of innovating for improvement in the latest National Health Executive podcast.

Dr Kechagioglou, who is CCIO and consultant clinical oncologist at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, shares what is already being done to drive improvement and what can be done to make it better.

She notes that within healthcare, doing the same thing again and again will lead to the same results and calls for things to be different in order to drive better results. She also underscores the importance that anything being done must add value – for both patients and organisations.

She shares with listeners what Coventry and Warwickshire have been working on – most notably its electronic patient record transformation programmes.

Dr Kechagioglou acknowledges that innovation is hard, with many barriers to implementation that need to be overcome, but believes that strategy and making the transformation mean something, can help overcome these issues.

🚨Upcoming events

8 October 2025, Online – Rewired 2026 conference and programme update