Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.
👇 News
🚀 InterSystems has launched its latest electronic health record (EHR) system, InterSystems IntelliCare, offering new, AI-driven capabilities. Introduced on 5 March 2025, the health information system is built on InterSystems’ TrakCare EHR and offers AI-driven documentation and summarisation tools, on-premises, cloud, or SaaS deployment options, amongst capabilities designed to streamline workflows and reduce administrative burden.
💰 Cambridge-founded biotech firm Ignota Labs has raised $6.9 million (£5.5m) in seed funding. Ignota Labs uses AI to help improve the safety of drugs and speed up the drug discovery processes by using “explainable AI” to analyse biological data, identify and fix safety issues in drugs and predict a drug’s potential toxicity based on its chemical structure. The round was co-led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures, with participation from Modi Ventures, Blue Wire Capital and Gaingels.
🦾 Healthtech company Mizaic has launched a new Access Request Manager (ARM) tool within its MediViewer platform, designed to streamline NHS access request management. NHS trusts handle over 3,000 access requests annually, with each taking anywhere up to two and a half hours to process manually. ARM aims to address this challenge by speeding up processing times, automatically aggregating patient data from multiple systems and ensuring compliance with response time obligations.
♥️ Digital health diagnostics company PocDoc has entered a partnership with community pharmacy chains Dears and Amiry & Gilbride Pharmacy that will see its at-home cardiovascular disease test, Healthy Heart Check, made available in more than 35 stores across Scotland and online. The finger-prick test delivers instant results and provides patients with a comprehensive cholesterol profile, body mass index score, NHS heart age, and a ten-year risk assessment for heart attacks or strokes.
✅ NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s Biorepository has become the first in the UK to receive ISO ‘general requirements for biobanking’ standard. The biobank, located at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, stores and provides access to a range of human tissue for use in medical research into various diseases. Accreditation against an ISO standard is a key indicator of high-quality processes and technical competence in the handling and storage of tissues used for research activities.
❓ Did you know?
A report by European IP firm Mewburn Ellis revealed a significant increase in the number of patents being filed for AI-based medtech solutions.
In Europe, 157 medtech AI patents were filed in 2023, compared to 141 in 2022 and 86 in 2021. In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, just 30 AI patents were filed in the medtech space, the report found.
Mewburn Ellis said the findings reflected the burgeoning state of AI in medtech, with European filings broadly matching trends in the rest of the world.
The report also explored specific uses for AI in the medtech industry. Patents concerning image analysis, including image classification and object recognition for preoperative planning, have seen most success in terms of patents that have been granted.
📖 What we’re reading
The King’s Fund’s Social Care 360 report, published in March 2025, highlights the ongoing financial pressures in adult social care in England, with a particular focus on how rising costs – driven largely by wage increases – have influenced service provision.
The introduction of the National Living Wage in 2016 significantly increased pay for care workers. However, without corresponding funding from central government, local authorities were forced to absorb these higher costs, leading to a reduction in the number of people receiving long-term care.
While recent funding increases have temporarily reversed the trend, the report warns that the social sector remains vulnerable, and that the number of people accessing care could once again decline without intervention. The report underlines the need for a long-term funding strategy that ensures wage improvements do not come at the expense of service availability.
“The losers may well be people who draw on care services. If local authorities have to pay more to providers while struggling to balance their books, then they will ration services (and seek other savings elsewhere), however reluctantly.
“That would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one. It should be a key concern for the first phase of the government’s new commission on adult social care,” the report says.
🚨 Upcoming events
18–19 March, NEC Birmingham — Digital Health Rewired 2025