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  

☁️ EMIS has announced the start of an “active roll out” of its cloud-based platform EMIS-X, marking what EMIS is calling the first step on a larger journey to migrate all services and software to the cloud. The company noted that functionality will be “added gradually” and practices can “adopt new features at a reasonable pace without feeling the need to have to retrain on a completely brand-new system from day one”. 

🧠 A new study in JAMA Network Open found that in up to 10% of patients diagnosed with dementia, undiagnosed liver disease may be causing similar neurological symptoms: trouble with cognition, motor skills, sleep, and mood. There are treatments for the complication of cirrhosis called hepatic encephalopathy, such as combining antibiotics and the synthetic sugar lactulose to remove the buildup of toxins in the brain. About half of people with cirrhosis develop hepatic encephalopathy. 

󠁷 Digital Health and Care Wales’s approach to digital inclusion has been described as “exemplary” after the organisation was awarded Digital Inclusion Charter Accreditation. The Digital Inclusion Charter exists to support and champion organisations working in the public, private or third sector in Wales who are willing to promote basic digital skills and help people get online. The charter is part of the Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Wellbeing programme, delivered by Cwmpas. DHCW joins 10 other organisations to be awarded accreditation. 

🖥 Elsevier Health, a medical information and data analytics company, has announced a strategic partnership with OpenEvidence, a company specialising in AI for medicine, to develop ClinicalKey AI, a next-generation clinical decision support tool that combines the most recent and reputable evidence-based medical content with generative AI to help physicians at the point of care. By combining Elsevier’s vast corpus of trusted medical information with advanced AI technology, ClinicalKey AI can help physicians access accurate evidence-based information at the point of care. 

✅ FUSE-AI – Künstliche Intelligenz in der Radiologie, an innovator in AI for radiology, has announced its AI software “Prostate.Carcinoma.ai” has received EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) 2017/745 IIa certification. As of January 2024, the company is authorised to distribute its software as a medical product. Prostate.Carcinoma.ai significantly aids radiologists by automatically segmenting the prostate gland in MRI scans and independently identifying pathological changes, promising a 30% time saving per patient. This efficiency translates into considerable financial benefits for radiological clinics and practices, fueling strong interest in the deployment of the AI algorithm. The software’s integration into existing clinical software systems ensures user-friendliness and preserves radiologists’ familiarity with their work environment. Additionally, radiologists have tested the product for their colleagues in an evidence-based clinical trial. 

❓ Did you know that 

The new European Patent Office (EPO) study, “Patents and Innovation against Cancer”, reveals a remarkable 70% surge in cancer-focused inventions and technologies from 2015 to 2021, gauged by the proliferation of international patent families (IPFs). More than 140,000 cancer-fighting inventions have been disclosed in public patent documents over the past 50 years.   

📖 What we’re reading 

Low physical activity has been associated with poor prognosis in haemodialysis (HD) patients. Interventions to maintain healthy lifestyle in this population are important to reduce mortality. A new study in Nature aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of digital health interventions (DHIs) for improving the physical activity and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in HD patients. 

🚨 This week’s events 

6-7 February, The King’s Fund (online) – Delivering effective place-based care