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

❓Care technology company Teton has launched Samwise, an AI agent that gives care home staff and hospital ward teams direct conversational access to operational data. Teton’s platform uses sensors to monitor resident and patient activity, sleep, movement, and respiration and supports dashboards and summary reports by answering questions such as “which residents had disrupted sleep this week?”

🫀Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, part of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has expanded its cardiac catheterisation lab provision with the installation of Canon Medical’s specialist angiography X-ray system, the Alphenix Core+. The specialist imaging system supports pacemaker implantation, one of the most common types of heart surgery.

🙍‍♀️North Kent Mind, an independent mental health charity providing support to people in Dartford, Gravesham, Swanley, and Medway, has launched an early intervention emotional wellbeing and mental health service. The Medway Therapeutic Alliance was launched in response to a rise in the mental health needs of children in the region and increasing numbers of families seeking support.

🤝 Heartfelt Technologies is working with Patients Know Best to automate and accelerate clinical trial recruitment. The companies claim a digital-first approach over a concentrated four-week window overcame typical recruitment bottlenecks by informing and enabling eligible patients to rapidly connect with research opportunities.

📁 Noveva Software Group is supporting Velindre Cancer Service’s new centre with its CCube Cloud EDMS platform. The platform will enable the digitisation, storage, and secure retrieval of clinical documentation to reduce Velindre University NHS Trust’s reliance on paper-based records, as well as integrate with Welsh national healthcare infrastructure.

🩸 Researchers at Lund University have developed an AI model showing that it is possible to detect several neurodegenerative diseases from a single blood sample. A team led by researchers Jacob Vogel and Lijun An has developed an AI model capable of detecting multiple diseases at once. The model is based on protein measurements from more than 17,000 patients and control participants.

❓ Did you know that?

Research from Noble Live-In Care, part of UK care provider CCH Group, reveals that a lack of forward planning is leaving the UK’s health and social care system constantly reacting to crises instead of preparing for future demand.

Without effective forecasting, hospitals and social care services are often reacting to crises rather than anticipating needs, according to an analysis of data. This leaves patients waiting longer for the right support,

Researchers claim the financial cost of not planning is already significant. Delayed hospital discharges, often caused by gaps in social care capacity, are costing taxpayers more than £23 million in a single month, with NHS bed days averaging around £562 each.

Across the UK, pressure on services continues to build. Hospital bed occupancy regularly exceeds safe levels, while delays in discharging patients, often due to a lack of available care in the community, remain a persistent challenge.

📖 What we’re reading

A study claims multilingual, voice-enabled chatbots could enhance patient education in eye care.

Transforming patient education on retinal detachment: A multilingual voice-enabled retrieval-augmented generation chatbot, outlines how patients can access retinal detachment advice through personalised, real-time, clinically grounded conversations.

A research team led by University of East London’s Dr Mohammad Hossein Amirhosseini and Dr Fatima Kalabi from Queen’s Hospital in London, in collaboration with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, and Inselspital University Hospital of Bern in Switzerland, has developed a multilingual voice-enabled AI chatbot designed to help people understand retinal detachment – a sight-threatening condition that often requires urgent surgery.

The system allows patients to ask questions in natural language and receive answers drawn from trusted medical sources.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics.

🚨 Upcoming events

• 28 April 2026, Online – Understanding the NHS Management and Leadership Framework in Practice