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  

👌 UK healthcare informatics provider Epro has been awarded the ISO 9001 quality assurance accreditation, the internationally recognised standard for Quality Management Systems (QMS).   

🏥 AZ Groeninge will be the first Belgian hospital to utilize PIPRA’s cutting-edge technology, which pre-operatively predicts postoperative delirium (POD) in older surgical patients, a condition that is often underdiagnosed. POD is a stressful cognitive disorder that presents as an acute onset of confusion, inattention, and an altered level of consciousness. It affects 23% of patients over the age of 60 and generally arises one to three days post-surgery. PIPRA, the innovator behind the world-first AI-based software in the field of delirium, has developed a revolutionary prevention technology that blends AI technlogy and a curated clinical database to provide an automated calculation of the risk of an individual developing POD with remarkable accuracy. 

💊 BehaVR, a pioneering force in digital therapeutics (DTx) experiences, and Fern Health, a virtual chronic pain management program,have signed an agreement to merge their businesses and create a new digital care management solution for chronic pain. The new offering will be branded as RealizedCare, and strives to meet the increased demand for evidence-based, more scalable, impactful and economically viable solutions for a range of mental and behavioral health burdens, beginning with chronic pain. 

🩺The quest to eliminate lung cancer as a global cause of death has taken a positive step forward with 1 million-milestone met of a 5-million lung health Artificial Intelligence (AI) commitment. This new proactive initiative casts a wider net to currently invisible and unprofiled global patient populations, innovating beyond traditional lung cancer screening profiles such as age and smoking history. The commitment was made at the 2022 World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos. It saw AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company, join the WEF EDISON Alliance, a partnership between commercial and non-profit sectors, to improve the lives of people through digital inclusion. 

📉 A new report has found medical business owners are most likely to sell in 2024 after a tough year for businesses. The UK Business Investment Report was carried out by equity management platform Vestd, after the latest government figures revealed that firms going bust are at their highest levels since 2009. 

❓ Did you know that? 

Most pet owners (66%) say they’ll spend ‘whatever it takes’ on their much loved pet’s health, but three in five (61%) believe prescription medication has simply become too expensive. That’s according to new research from Pharmacy2U, as it launches a new pharmacist-led online Pet Health service, offering high-quality, cost-effective, and convenient access to veterinary medications and treatments. 

📖 What we’re reading 

In a recent ICTworks article, Karamagi et al. describe digital health as in a state of e-Chaos. They demand digital health projects “stop further duplication, [and instead] encourage interventions that holistically strengthen the health systems.” Digital health works exactly as it was designed and that’s the problem! Despite remarkable progress in digital health, we believe the industry faces significant obstacles to greater impact if we continue with business as usual — and instead propose a holistic solution built around the FHIR standard. 

🚨 This week’s events 

22 November 12:30-13:30 – Webinar: The Role of Digital Flow Systems in Optimising for Winter 

23 November 12:30-13:30 –  Webinar: Establishing effective partnerships for digital health start-ups