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
🤖 Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust has introduced a conversational AI agent designed enhance care for cataract patients. The automated voice system, called Dora, is able to call patients to ask questions, understand their answers and accurately identify responses indicating the need for clinical review. Dora is being used to contact eligible patients during pre-operative assessment and pre-surgery to check important details, and is now beginning to be used for pre-surgery reminder calls.
⭐ A nurse at University Hospitals Plymouth (UHP) has been recognised for her work enhancing maternity services. Sarah Saxby, transformation midwife at UHP, has played a key role in maternity care innovation at the trust, implementing Personalised Care and Support Plans and integrating these into UHP’s digital notes system. This has earned her national recognition through the Chief Midwifery Officer Silver Award, presented by Kate Brintworth, chief midwifery officer for England.
🩻 Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has introduced an AI-assisted MRI scanner at Charing Cross Hospital to improve its diagnostic capability and reduce waiting times. The new Philips MR 7700 3T scanner is a replacement for the existing 16-year-old scanner and represents part of a wider, £3.4m investment programme at Imperial College Healthcare. The scanner also features an internal display and audio to guide patients through the process.
🚀 Electronic health record provider Patients Know Best (PKB) now has five million registered patients. According to PKB, the company is seeing an average of 100,000 new registrations monthly, with one in four registered patients logging into their PKB account at least once a month. The company says it is contracted with 25% of the UK’s acute hospitals.
💉 Biotech company EnsiliTech has received £1.4 million from Innovate UK to develop its novel technology for administering medication. The University of Bath spinout has developed a technique for encasing vaccine and antibody molecules in a silica shell, keeping them stable at room temperature. This prevents them from clumping when mixed in a solution and could eventually make it possible to administer medicines in a simple injection, rather than intravenously.
❓Did you know?
Almost every (99%) GP practice in England has now upgraded their phone technology in preparation for the new GP contract in October 2025, according to NHS England.
The new GP contract coming in October 2025 aims to modernise general practice by requiring surgeries to allow patients to request appointments online.
The move to new telephony technology has already enabled GPs to provide millions more appointments, NHS England said. There were 31.4 million GP appointments in March 2025, a year-on-year increase of 6.1 per cent and a fifth (19.8%) higher than pre-pandemic figures.
📖 What we’re reading
The NHS Confederation report, ‘Resetting the relationship: towards a social model of health creation and care‘, looks at what shifting to a neighbourhood model of care could mean for meeting long-term NHS goals.
Published on 29 April 2025, the report summarises findings from a national policy sprint exploring how a “neighbourhood health service” would create the clearest path to better population health, specifically by shifting resources into communities and in a way that promotes better preventative care.
It notes that the “limited ability to shift focus from short-term fixes to long-term health” remains a key barrier, noting that resources remain tied up in meeting central performance targets and “prioritisation of output metrics over real health outcomes”. As a result, local innovation takes a backfoot because frontline workers aren’t able to work in ways that benefit their communities.
The report calls for a shift in NHS culture from top-down control to trust-based collaboration. This means giving staff autonomy and backing local innovation with consistent funding, as well as measuring success by health outcomes rather than activity.
“The aim must be to ignite self-efficacy: giving staff on the frontline and the communities they serve confidence, capacity and power to identify local problems and develop their own solutions,” the report says.
“It is vital that they feel empowered to take the actions key to improving population health. Opening up the space for grassroots innovation will help shift resources to the interventions that matter most locally.”
🚨 Upcoming events
29 May, virtual event – NHS Workforce 2025
