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

🏋️‍♀️ Holly Health, an AI-driven health coaching platform, is partnering with GLL, a charitable social enterprise that operates more than 250 leisure centres and gyms under its ‘Better’ brand. The collaboration sees Holly Health’s technology embedded in GLL’s Better UK app, bringing personalised habit-change support for nutrition, movement, sleep and mental wellbeing to more than 362,000 members.

👩‍⚕️ Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust is implementing Wolters Kluwer’s clinical decision support solution, ‘UpToDate Enterprise Edition’. The system delivers evidence-based content across the care team, enabling clinicians to make informed, confident decisions at the point of care. With AI-Enhanced Search, clinicians can use natural language queries to receive relevant verbatim answers from UpToDate clinical content, saving valuable time.

💰 The British Business Bank has agreed a $100 million (£74.1m) cornerstone commitment to SV Health Investors’ new flagship fund, SV8 Fund LP, a multi-stage therapeutics-dedicated fund. The commitment supports the UK’s Life Sciences Sector Plan and is the latest in the British Business Bank’s ongoing work to back the UK’s high-growth, high-potential life sciences companies.

🕵️‍♀️ A Heriot-Watt University researcher has been awarded £2m to develop quantum sensors that will ‘spy’ on immune cells as they encounter cancer tumours, revealing why treatments work for some patients but fail for others. Dr Aldona Mzyk will use sensors as small as a single electron to ‘eavesdrop’ on the molecular signals that cause immune cells to malfunction when they reach solid tumours. The technology will detect changes thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair, tracking in real time the metabolic sabotage that makes cancer treatments fail.

🤝 The Crown Commercial Service has launched its Technology Services 4 framework, providing a flexible way for public sector organisations to buy technology services. The new agreement includes significant improvements to help remove procurement barriers, with the changes based on feedback from both suppliers and users of Technology Services 3. It is the largest framework of its kind in the public sector and will run for up to eight years.

❓ Did you know that?

Doceree, an AI-powered operating system for healthcare marketing, has published a report which forecasts that by 2026-27, agentic AI systems will enable pharma brands to deliver intelligence at unprecedented scale, enhancing how the industry supports healthcare professionals and patient care.

The report says that AI agents will increasingly enable first-line scientific exchange, query resolution, and engagement continuity—moving beyond information delivery to intelligence that works alongside human teams.

According to industry data, agentic AI analysis projects 30-45% productivity gains and 75-85% automation of current pharma-healthcare professionals workflows within five years, freeing human representatives to focus on relationships.

📖 What we’re reading

In an article for NHS Confederation, Richard Kirby, chief executive at Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, argues that an ambitious vision for neighbourhood care should maintain a clear shared purpose among partners to improve health outcomes.

Over the summer, the government’s 10 year health plan set out a vision for a neighbourhood health service.

“I believe neighbourhood working is an exciting opportunity to shift to a new model of care, working closely with local government, the voluntary sector and communities themselves.

“If done well, not only will it improve the quality of care and support we provide to citizens to live well in healthy communities, but it will also help to manage the financial, demographic, and social factors from outside of the NHS that impact on care,” Kirby said.

🚨 Upcoming events

21 January 2026, 12.30-1.30pm, Online – Rewired 2026 conference and programme update: January 2026