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

📱OpenAI has announced the launch of ChatGPT Health in the US – a new feature that connects its AI chatbot with users’ medical records and wellness apps for more personalised answers to medical questions. The firm says that health is one of the most common ways people use ChatGPT, with hundreds of millions of people asking health and wellness questions each week.

🔎 Ireland-based Socrates, part of global healthcare technology company Lanas, has launched a digital feature, in collaboration with Medical Protection Society, to help identify which GP consulted with a patient and when. This aims to avoid multiple clinicians being drawn into clinical negligence claims when they have not been involved in a patient’s care.

🏆 Interweave, hosted by Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, has won the Delivering Value with Digital Technologies award at the HFMA National Healthcare Finance Awards. The award win recognises the development of an integrated digital platform that is addressing the fragmentation of patient data across the system. The Interweave platform was developed closely with three Yorkshire Integrated Care Boards, covering more than 74 organisations from health and social care, GP practices and care homes.

💤 Boots Online Doctor has launched an Insomnia Treatment service, giving adults struggling with chronic sleep difficulties access to advice, treatment options and guidance on better sleep within 24 hours. The service includes an online questionnaire reviewed by clinicians, with a treatment plan that may include prescription medication if appropriate.

🔒 Mindpeak, an AI-powered digital pathology firm, has been granted its first patent, covering a novel way to train an AI system so it can accurately spot and classify different cells in tissue samples in medical diagnosis. The patent has been issued in 17 EU member states and was additionally validated in the UK. It protects Mindpeak’s proprietary approach for developing AI models capable of recognising and classifying individual cells within complex pathology images.

💼 Healthcare software provider Dedalus has announced that it will create 100 new high-value jobs in Ireland over the next four years as part of a €10 million (£8.73m) expansion of its Irish operations. The expansion will bring Dedalus’s total Irish workforce to 150 people, scaling its presence across software engineering, product management, clinical informatics, data and analytics, cyber security, and implementation services.

❓ Did you know that?

Research from Linus Health, an AI-driven brain health company, found that AI can detect biological signs of Alzheimer’s Disease years before symptoms are noted by the patient or their loved ones using a three-minute digital assessment delivered in a physician’s office.

It found that the test can also signal cognitive impairment and flag patients who should undergo further testing with blood-based, PET, or CSF biomarkers to enable earliest disease detection when action has the greatest potential to change disease trajectory and prevent, minimise, or slow down disability.

The findings come from two peer-reviewed studies: a clinical analysis of nearly 1,000 participants and an independent preclinical study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Aging Brain Study.

The studies are ‘Concurrent detection of cognitive impairment and amyloid positivity with a multimodal machine learning-enabled digital cognitive assessment’, published in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy and ‘Higher amyloid and tau burden is associated with faster decline on a digital cognitive test’, published in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

📖 What we’re reading

According to an analysis from Polaris Market Research, the global market for wearable medical devices is expected to grow from a valuation of $35.8bn (£26.5bn) in 2024 to $143.7 billion (£106.4bn) by 2034, at a compound annual growth rate of 14.9%.

It says that this growth is being driven by mounting health consciousness worldwide, rapid technological advances in sensor and AI-enabled monitoring, and increased demand for home-based healthcare, remote patient monitoring, and chronic disease management.

According to the report, the diagnostic devices segment — including wearable blood-glucose monitors, pulse oximeters, heart rate and blood pressure monitors — accounted for the largest market share in 2024. These devices are gaining traction owing to rising prevalence of metabolic disorders and chronic diseases.

🚨 Upcoming events

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