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 

🩸 Tens of thousands of children and adults living with type 1 diabetes across England are set to receive an ‘artificial pancreas’ in a world-first initiative being rolled out by the NHS. The groundbreaking device continually monitors a person’s blood glucose, then automatically adjusts the amount of insulin given to them through a pump. Local NHS systems will start identifying eligible people living with type 1 diabetes who health chiefs believe could benefit from the Hybrid Closed Loop system- sometimes called an artificial pancreas – from today. There are currently 269,095 people living in England with type 1 diabetes. The technology will mean some people with type 1 diabetes will no longer need to inject themselves with insulin but rely on technology to receive this life saving medication. 

📈 Practice Plus Group (PPG), a loyal customer of IMS MAXIMS, started their digital transformation journey with the company in 2006 by successfully implementing MAXIMS Electronic Patient Record Solution (EPR) across multiple sites. The Southwest Treatment Centre sites were among the first sites to launch MAXIMS EPR. Fast forward to June 2023, where five sites continued to operate with a competitor’s software, PPG made the strategic decision to migrate these remaining sites to MAXIMS EPR, meaning all PPG hospitals and diagnostic centres were using MAXIMS EPR. The project to synchronised go-live across these five sites simultaneously was a huge undertaking and marked a remarkable achievement for PPG reflecting on the collaborative efforts and meticulous planning invested in the migration process. Moving forward to 2024, all PPG sites will undergo an upgrade to the latest version of MAXIMS EPR, which will bring a magnitude of advantages. Standardising the latest version of the solution ensures consistency in features, functionality, and security protocols, streamlining maintenance and support processes. 

🤰 Nathan Blue, assistant professor in obstetrics and gynaecology in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah, is designing an AI-based tool that will scour massive databases of past pregnancy outcomes to find the hidden patterns of warning signs—from underlying genetic risk factors to environmental factors and clinical measurements—that mark the difference between a risky pregnancy and a relatively safe one. The tool could then use those patterns to estimate the risk of stillbirth for future pregnancies. When a new patient arrives in the clinic with a fetus that is smaller than expected, their doctor could input their unique risk factors into the tool, and it would calculate a personalised estimate of their risk of stillbirth. 

📲 Digital health firm Archangel has recently launched its Responder app targeted at health, housing and social care organisations. The app, unveiled at the 2024 ITEC Conference, allows responders to deal with both individual and asset alarms such as SOS, fall detection and medication adherence as well as smoke, leak and mould detection in a property. Alarm notifications can be set up to broadcast or cascade depending on the needs of organisations.

👩 An AI tool tested by the NHS successfully identified tiny signs of breast cancer in 11 women, which had been missed by human doctors. The tool, called Mia, was piloted alongside NHS clinicians and analysed the mammograms of over 10,000 women. Most of them were cancer-free, but it successfully flagged all of those with symptoms, as well as an extra 11 the doctors did not identify. Because it works instantly, tools like Mia also have the potential to reduce the waiting time for results from 14 days down to three, claims its developer Kheiron

❓ Did you know that? 

Research by experts at The Devonshire Clinic reveals searches for cancer symptoms rose by 82% on the day of Kate Middleton’s diagnosis announcement. Searches remained 22% higher than average a week later. 

📖 What we’re reading 

News Medical – The Role of AI in Pathogen Detection and Epidemic Protection by Antonia Du Bois, BSc Molecular Biology and Genetics, MSc Molecular Genetics

🚨 This week’s events 

3-4 April, London Business School – LBS HealthCare Conference 2024