Finnish health tech businesses have enjoyed a pandemic lift with more than half reporting a positive impact during the spring as the crisis unfolded, according to a survey carried out by Health Capital Helsinki, the alliance that supports growth, collaboration and international investment in the country’s innovator community.
The alliance asked the 57 SMEs on its list of Finnish COVID-19-related...
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS trust, in the UK, has reduced unnecessary referrals to A&E by up to 83% since installing Cinapsis, a digital triage platform that could help UK hospitals tackle the consultation backlog that has built up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cinapsis allows GPs to ‘beam in’ consultants via an app, maintaining specialist support while reducing the need for hospital visits...
SOS Alarm, the company that operates Sweden’s 112 emergency number, is to use drones to deliver Automated External Defibrillators (AED) for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) for the first time in a trial that begins in June.
The clinical study into the use of emergency medical drone transport for real incidents is the latest phase of a research collaboration between SOS Alarm, the Center for...
Cognitant Group has launched Healthinote, an app that provides patients with up-to-date, verified healthcare information to help them understand their conditions and treatment options better, and counters the potential impact of "fake news" on their decisions and outcomes.
With a search facility, a favourite page for users to save personalised information and a share function, the app also uses...
Digital triage tool eConsult has helped some GP practices to reverse their usual ratio of face-to-face/remote patient consultations since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK, with one multi-site practice estimating that 90% of its digital consultations are now completed remotely. Previously, up to 45% would usually lead to a face-to-face appointment.
Dr Mark Harmon, an urgent care consultant and...
EIT Health is to fund 14 health innovation projects across Europe in the latest phase of its contribution to the fight against COVID-19.
The projects – which have been allocated more than €6 million between them - were selected through EIT Health’s Rapid Response initiative, which aims to fast-track the development of tools and systems that could have an immediate impact on management of the...
Deploying contact tracing earlier in the UK would have saved lives, an epidemiologist working with the government on the forthcoming NHS tracing app has told the BBC.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show on 26 April, Professor Christophe Fraser from the Oxford Big Data Institute said he thought lives would have been saved if a contact tracing policy had been pursued earlier in the outbreak.
“I worked...
The UK government’s system allowing keyworkers to book COVID-19 tests stopped accepting applications just hours after going live, due to overwhelming demand.
The system was announced by the secretary of state for health Matt Hancock on 23 April and launched the following day but by mid-morning, visitors to the gov.uk web page were being told to check back later.
The Department of Health and...
By the time it has passed, the COVID-19 pandemic will have driven the equivalent of a decade of digital transformation, such is the speed with which the UK health tech sector has responded to demand at every level of research and healthcare delivery.
That’s the view of one contributor to a government-led statement acknowledging the sector’s contribution to tackling the coronavirus crisis, issued...
Returning and redeployed clinicians drafted to NHS ICUs during the COVID-19 pandemic are now able to get up to speed with ventilation skills by using a new online tool from FundamentalVR, which specialises in developing immersive simulations for training surgeons.
The tool will help hospitals to retain and boost their capacity at a time when resources are stretched by high patient numbers and...
