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   

📊 MEDITECH, the first health IT company to introduce a solution, called Expanse Genomics, that fully integrates genomic data throughout the EHR, is actively releasing its first wave of Genomics/Oncology clinical decision support to an early adopter. This solution will provide up-to-date details on variant interpretation, utilising real-time interpretation from sources such as ClinVar. This will allow it to signal to providers whether a variant has changed from ‘unknown significance’ to ‘pathogenic,’ which has the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes and promote comprehensive care. 

✔ Huma, a leading global digital health firm, announced this week that it has received Saudi FDA Class C certification for a disease-agnostic Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom’s ambitious and groundbreaking healthcare program now has a software supplier that can support its vision and growth. The platform will now be able to monitor patients across all age groups, including infants and those pregnant, and seamlessly integrate with various external devices such as heart rate and blood sugar monitors, and smart inhalers. 

🧑‍⚖️ The families of two now-deceased former beneficiaries of UnitedHealth have filed a lawsuit against the health care giant, alleging it knowingly used a faulty AI algorithm to deny elderly patients coverage for extended care deemed necessary by their doctors. The lawsuit, filed last Tuesday in federal court in Minnesota, claims UnitedHealth illegally denied “elderly patients care owed to them under Medicare Advantage Plans” by deploying an AI model known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients’ physicians that the expenses were medically necessary. 

📈 NHS England has set its sights on growing the number of users who rely on its FutureNHS cloud-based collaboration platform from just over 310,000 today to 600,000 by 2025. The growth projection follows NHS England’s renewal of its hosting and support contract for the platform with SME public sector IT services provider Kahootz. The two-year contract was renewed via the government’s G-Cloud procurement framework and is valued at £1.67m. 

🤝 InnoScot Health and Heriot-Watt University are set to link up once again to deliver webinar learnings around successfully achieving Stateside medical device compliance. Last year, the two organisations signed a five-year agreement which would continue to see Heriot-Watt University’s Medical Device Manufacturing Centre (MDMC) collaborate with InnoScot Health to help bring new ideas and innovations from healthcare professionals to life. Representing a fresh facet of that relationship, InnoScot Health’s Head of Regulatory Affairs Elaine Gemmell and Professor Marc Desmulliez, Manager of the MDMC will help to lead a free online webinar entitled FDA Regulations on Medical Devices: How to Penetrate the US Market which is taking place on Friday 24 November at 10am. The workshop – run by MDMC and Scottish Enterprise – will be hosted on Microsoft Teams with a link provided to attendees following registration. Register to attend here. 

❓ Did you know that? 

A recent survey conducted by Deloitte’s Center for Health Solutions (Center) revealed a growing acceptance and optimism among consumers regarding the potential of Generative AI  to revolutionise healthcare.  

Over half of the respondents (53%) believe that generative AI could improve access to healthcare, while 46% expressed confidence in its ability to make healthcare more affordable.

📖 What we’re reading

AI offers inferences and indicates probabilities by applying complex algorithms to reams of personal, public, and government data to execute tasks previously beyond human capability. In particular, using extensive computational resources, AI can learn to make inferences about individual cases based on patterns in these data. However, neither these computational resources nor vast amounts of data guarantee that AI outputs will take into account key values: the values that we hold about what is right and wrong for us as individuals, as clinicians and as patients, in the ways we practise and the ways we are cared for, the BMJ reports.

🚨 This week’s events 

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