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

💊 UK-based online pharmacy MedExpress has implemented Quadient Impress, a cloud-based document automation platform, to streamline the delivery of medical correspondence. The partnership digitises manual, paper-based workflows to help MedExpress process thousands of medical letters a day and nsure secure, compliant and trackable patient communications.

🔬 Inventus has been named as one of the fastest growing UK tech companies in The Sunday Times 100 Tech 2026. The company creates, delivers, and manages devices and technology solutions exclusively for clinical trials. Inventus combines purpose-built patient and site devices, protocol-ready configuration, secure connectivity and centralised mobile device management designed for clinical trials.

🧠 UK-based digital mental health services provider Kooth has agreed a $2.6 million (£1.9m) one-year contract with an undisclosed US state for digital mental health services for up to 100,000 students. Kooth will deliver mental health support via its Soluna platform to students aged 13-18 years-old across the state, including online behavioural health education resources, a peer community, and chat-based counselling sessions with state-licensed behavioural health professionals.

🥦 The University of Warwick has started patient recruitment for study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service which aims to improve access to obesity care across the NHS. The study will follow 450 patients over up to two years to assess weight loss, health outcomes and service efficiency to address bottlenecks in obesity care.

👩‍💻 The Department of Health and Social Care is inviting healthcare organisations and individuals to spread the word about a campaign to help people understand how to contact their GP surgery online. Organisations and individuals are encouraged to share the campaign using resources from the Campaign Resource Centre and the NHS GP surgery blog.

💽 Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust says that it has cut the time spent on mortality reviews by almost half after overhauling its approach to benchmarking, data quality, and clinical coding, releasing time for higher-value patient safety work. Monthly time spent reviewing mortality cases has reduced from 13.5 hours to 5.5 hours, while the number of patient-level reviews has fallen from around 40 to around 20.

❓ Did you know that?

Data obtained by Medical Negligence Assist shows that NHS trusts in England have paid out more than £230 million in compensation to patients with claims linked to radiology-related mistakes since 2020.

Between 2020 and 2025, a total of 2,163 radiology-related claims were brought against NHS trusts in England, according to gathered by freedom of information requests to NHS Resolution.

Of these, 1,520 claims were settled, with the highest annual total recorded in 2024/25, when 504 claims were made.

Over the last 10 years, the number of settled radiology negligence claims has risen by around 30%, marking one of the sharpest increases among all clinical negligence areas.

Sophie Cope, medical negligence solicitor for JF Law, said: “Radiology is a key part of modern healthcare and includes diagnostic tests such as X-rays, MRI scans, CT scans and ultrasounds.

“These tools are a vital step in identifying a patient’s condition and ensuring they receive the appropriate treatment.

“When something goes wrong at this stage, whether a scan is carried out to a poor standard, misinterpreted, delayed, or never carried out in the first place, the impact on a patient’s health can be profound.”

📖 What we’re reading

Results of a randomised controlled trial of more than 100,000 Swedish women, published in The Lancet on 31 January 2026, found that AI-supported mammography identifies more cancers during screening and reduces the rate of breast cancer diagnosis in the following years.

Interim safety results of the MASAI trial, published in The Lancet Oncology in 2023, found a 44% reduction in screen-reading workload for radiologists, and an early analysis of the trial published in The Lancet Digital Health, found a 29% increase in cancer detection without an increase in false positives.

The full results of the trial show that AI-supported mammography also reduces cancer diagnoses in the years following a breast cancer screening appointment by 12% – a key test of screening programme effectiveness.

Lead author Dr Kristina Lång from Lund University, Sweden, said: “Widely rolling out AI-supported mammography in breast cancer screening programmes could help reduce workload pressures amongst radiologists, as well as helping to detect more cancers at an early stage, including those with aggressive subtypes.

“However, introducing AI in healthcare must be done cautiously, using tested AI tools and with continuous monitoring in place to ensure we have good data on how AI influences different regional and national screening programmes and how that might vary over time.”

🚨 Upcoming events

10 February 2026, 12.30-1.30pm, Online – Why History Matters: Strengthening Maternity And Neonatal Safety Through Reliable Access To Historical Data