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

🪨 Employee assistance programme supplier Pebble Wellbeing is partnering with Doctor Care Anywhere, a UK virtual primary care provider, to offer customers rapid access to GP and physiotherapy appointments. Pebble offers digital mental health tools, confidential counselling, and a support line for employees.

🎓 Bupa will train 900 ‘future focused specialists’ over the next three years as part of a long-running apprenticeship programme. The apprenticeships are separated into three academies – leadership, AI, and change, and data and technology – which aim to train 300 people per year.

🧪 NHS-licensed digital healthcare platform Evaro has partnered with U-Test to offer customers a direct pathway from diagnostic results to prescription and fulfilment. U-Test customers testing positive for conditions such as STI and UTIs can now access Evaro’s prescription services and get medication delivered within 24 hours of receiving test results, removing the barrier of GP appointments and pharmacy visits.

🐈 Pharmacy2U has relaunched its veterinary care platform, ThePharmPetCo, as Pharmacy2U Pet Health, to offer pet services alongside ‘human’ health services via an app using a combined basket feature. The move comes as a major probe is underway with the Competition and Markets Authority investigating prescription pricing in the veterinary sector, with a final decision due to be announced in early spring.

🔬 London-based molecular health monitoring startup Sava Technologies has completed an independent clinical study, enrolling 46 participants with Type 1 and insulin-dependent Type 2 diabetes across sites in Oxford and Cambridge. The study demonstrated reliable glucose measurement using Sava’s proprietary microsensor technology over the 10-day wear period.

💉Scottish company Airglove Medical has announced the launch of Airglove v2, an air warming system developed to enhance vein physiology prior to venepuncture and improve access in patients with difficult intravenous access. The system was launched following oncology trials in more than 150 UK hospitals since 2018, including Royal Marsden Cancer Centre, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital and St Barts Hospital.

❓ Did you know that?

Barnsley has become the UK’s first government backed ‘Tech Town’ as a pilot scheme to improve public services, offer better support in schools, and provide quicker NHS care.

Liz Kendall, technology secretary, said that the plans will act as a national blueprint for how AI can improve everyday life across the UK.

Over the next 18 months, the government will work with local business leaders, educators, NHS workers and more to “build local talent who can access the jobs of the future, and make local services fit for the AI era”.

Tech firms including Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe and Google are backing the plans by pledging a package of initiatives to boost Barnsley’s AI and digital talent.

Kendall said:  “What we learn here will shape how we roll out AI across the UK – making sure every community sees the benefits.”

📖 What we’re reading

A study by a team of  researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital has found AI-powered software capable of revealing distinct patterns of structural changes in patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The signals that drive many of the brain and body’s most essential functions – consciousness, sleep, breathing, heart rate and motion – course through bundles of “white matter” fibres in the brainstem, but imaging systems so far have been unable to finely resolve these crucial neural cables.

This has left researchers and doctors with little capability to assess how they are affected by trauma or neurodegeneration.

However, the BrainStem Bundle Tool, which the team has made publicly available, reveals distinct patterns of structural changes in patients.

Mark Olchanyi, a doctoral candidate in MIT’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics Programme, said: “The brainstem is a region of the brain that is essentially not explored because it is tough to image.

“People don’t really understand its makeup from an imaging perspective. We need to understand what the organisation of the white matter is in humans and how this organisation breaks down in certain disorders.”

🚨 Upcoming events

• 24 – 25 March 2026, NEC Birmingham – Digital Health Rewired 2026