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

🤺Sword Health, a digital health company that develops physical therapy programmes for musculoskeletal conditions, pelvic health, and injury prevention, has launched Sword Intelligence in the UK. The service is designed to enable the safe application of AI to large-scale care operations, including triage, care coordination, outreach, scheduling and follow-up.

📒 Medical AI specialist Camgenium has launched risk‑adjusted clinical audit reports for NHS hospitals as part of a strategic restructuring of its medical analytics offering. Hospitals can commission one‑off, bespoke clinical audit reports without long‑term contractual commitments.

🩻 Medical imaging and cybersecurity provider Sectra has entered into an agreement to acquire Oxipit, a developer of clinically validated AI solutions for radiology. The transaction is expected to be completed during March 2026.

🤝 VitalHub UK and CEMBooks have announced a partnership focused on supporting NHS organisations with digital tools for operational insight and situational awareness. The partnership brings together SHREWD, VitalHub UK’s system-level operational platform and OPEL, with CEMBooks’ department-focused operational management tools.

👨‍⚕️ Doctorcall has won gold for Best Enterprising Business at the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry SME London Business Awards 2026. Doctorcall delivers home visiting GP care in London and supports patients across major UK cities, offering video consultations, corporate vaccination programmes, and access to a network of clinics and specialists.

🔬 A health-tech startup, based at the Cardiff University Medicentre, has launched to offer digital solutions for laboratories, Scalantis creates laboratory information management systems, with the ambition of eradicating errors that result in delayed treatment for patients, endanger research outcomes, and cause significant issues for toxicology results

❓ Did you know that?

A study, commissioned by TympaHealth, found that there is public support for local healthcare providers, including GPs, pharmacists, and audiologists, to use AI in ear and hearing health.

Researchers from Obsurvant surveyed more than 1,000 people in the UK aged over 18-years-old between 17 and 18 February 2026.

It found that more than two-thirds of adults would welcome the use of AI in supporting ear and hearing health if it helped reduce waiting times (67%) or speed up assessment and referral (66%).

Dr Krishan Ramdoo, ENT surgeon and founder of TympaHealth, said: “Public confidence in healthcare providers using AI to support ear and hearing health is a really important signal. People want faster access, clearer answers and fewer barriers.

“AI can now play an important role in supporting healthcare providers to have greater confidence in their assessment of a patient and determining next steps.”

AI and machine learning technology can be used for wax detection and recognising characteristics and patterns in images and videos that have been labelled by human experts.. 

📖 What we’re reading

A blog post, published by Nuffield Trust on 4 March 2026, reviews the phase 1 findings from a national NIHR-funded rapid evaluation of ambient voice technology (AVT) in the NHS.

Co-authors Jenny Shand and Steve Morris say that the promise of digital scribes is compelling and adoption is accelerating, but robust evidence on what AVT delivers is “surprisingly limited”.

They note that most existing evaluations stop at the point of documenting time savings, but rarely assess whether these savings lead to meaningful outcomes, such as patient experience, safety, workforce retention, or system capacity.

“Reduced documentation time is not an outcome in itself; it is an intermediate step.

“The outcomes might be improved patient experience, reduced burnout, better quality records, improved safety, increased capacity, or better staff retention.

“But those outcomes do not occur automatically. They depend on how time is repurposed, how workflows change, and how the wider system responds,” the blog says.

The authors call for a “clear logic model” to enables a clearer articulation of AVT’s benefits.

“Clear logic, consistent metrics, and attention to outcomes rather than just outputs will be essential if AVT is to deliver on its promise for staff, patients and the system as a whole,” they say.

🚨 Upcoming events

• 12 March 2026, online – Digital Transformation: AI, EHRS, And Data Interoperability
• 24 and 25 March 2026, Birmingham NEC – Digital Health Rewired