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

📒Nuffield Health is working with Diligram to deploy its MyStaff app across its UK hospital and fitness network. The app is a cloud‑based platform for document management and compliance for frontline healthcare teams.

🪽 Edinburgh-based investment syndicate Archangels has leveraged £41.1 million of investment in Scottish tech and life science companies during 2025. The total, which represents a 50% increase on 2024, includes around £12.8m invested directly by Archangels’ members and £28.4m of co-investment.

💉Digital pharmacy Oushk  Pharmacy has received formal recognition from the General Pharmaceutical Council for meeting its new standards for the supply of medicines requiring additional safeguards, including weight-management treatments. The standards were strengthened in early 2025 to bring greater consistency, transparency, and patient protection to online prescribing.

🫀 A data platform to transform heart rhythm disorder care has received £2.4m from the UK’s Medical Research Council. The OpenEP|NET project will create a national database to enable improved management and outcomes for patients with conditions like atrial fibrillation, which is the most common heart rhythm disorder.

💽 University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust will pay £593,460 to Histofy for a digital histology annotation solution for the West Midlands Secure Data Environment. Histofy will process deidentified digital pathology image data and the associated metadata for annotation purposes.

☢ Kromek, a technology business specialising in medical imaging and radiation detection systems, has secured a £6m funding package from HSBC. The revolving credit facility will provide additional working capital as the company scales production across its advanced imaging and chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear detection divisions.

🏥 Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany’s largest university hospital, has appointed Epic Systems to set up its hospital information system. Epic manages more than 3,000 HIS installations worldwide, including more than 100 in Europe.

❓ Did you know that?

The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its Global Alliance for Women’s Health has developed a Women’s Health Impact Tracking platform (WHIT) to track progress in closing the women’s health gap.

It supports the agenda set out in the WEF’s ‘Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap: How to Improve Lives and Economies for All‘ white paper. The blueprint made the case that closing the women’s health gap is both a moral imperative and a growth strategy. WHIT tracks key indicators across conditions and countries.

The WEF says that women still face a persistent health gap, spending 25% more of their lives in poorer health than men, yet an earlier report from the Forum and McKinsey Health Institute estimated that closing the women’s health gap could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion a year by 2040.

📖 What we’re reading

The Nuffield Trust has responded to the nine priorities announced for the NHS online hospital planned to open in 2027, which include menopause and menstrual problems which may be a sign of endometriosis or fibroids.

Dr Becks Fisher, Nuffield Trust director of research and policy, said in a statement: “Greater online NHS access will be helpful for some and the focus on menopause and menstrual health makes sense, with waits for gynaecology services intolerably long.”

She added: “However, tricky questions remain about how this new online hospital plan will be implemented. If the goal is boosting NHS capacity, rather than simply shifting resources around, the government and NHS will need to work out how doctors and nurses will be able to take this on without negatively impacting existing face-to-face work.

“NHS IT infrastructure could also pose a problem, as it will need to enable relevant information – like scan results – to be seen across different NHS organisations, something that is infamously difficult at the moment.

“Some patients may end up needing in person care after going down the online hospital route, so the NHS will need to ensure smooth transitions between services, avoiding leaving patients with a snakes and ladders system which lands them back at square one with their GP.”

The other priorities for NHS Online are glaucoma, medical retina (including age-related macular degeneration), cataracts, inflammatory bowel disease, iron deficiency anaemia, prostate enlargement and raised prostate-specific antigen (PSA).

🚨 This week’s events

16 January 2026, Online – Digital Tools Proven to Shift to Wellness and Prevention