Digital Health
• NHS England launched a self‑certified registry on 16 January 2026 for ambient voice technology (AVT) suppliers to prove compliance with clinical‑safety and data‑protection standards.
• The registry underpins AI‑scribing tools that transcribe clinician‑patient conversations, a cornerstone of the NHS 10‑year health plan and guidance issued in 2025.
• A study of the TORTUS AI‑scribe across nine London sites and more than 17,000 patient encounters showed a 23.5% increase in direct patient time, an 8.2% reduction in appointment length, and a 13.4% rise in A&E patients seen per shift.
• Officials caution that uneven infrastructure, limited Wi‑Fi and the need for staff training could slow adoption, while a national commission launched in September 2025 aims to speed MHRA approval of AVT tools.
AI
• Google announced two new open AI models, MedGemma 1.5 for advanced medical image interpretation and MedASR for clinical speech-to-text, as part of its Health AI Developer Foundations initiative to help developers build and scale healthcare applications.
• MedGemma 1.5 can process high-dimensional clinical data, including entire 3D CT/MRI volumes and whole-slide histopathology images, and supports prompts with multiple image slices or patches for richer context. It shows enhanced performance on internal medical imaging benchmarks compared to the previous version.
• Beyond images, MedGemma 1.5 also shows improved baseline performance on medical language tasks like question-answering and electronic health record interpretation by incorporating new training datasets and techniques.
• MedASR is a medical-domain speech-to-text model trained on healthcare vocabulary and clinical audio, designed to reduce errors in medical dictation and support integration in workflows (e.g., generating structured clinical notes).
Startups/ Innovation
• iSono Health has commercially launched ATUSA, a wearable, portable, 3D automated breast ultrasound system designed to improve point-of-care imaging for women’s breast health.
• ATUSA captures full 3D breast volumes in about two minutes per breast, which is roughly ten times faster than traditional manual ultrasound scans and produces consistent images regardless of operator skill.
• The system aims to address gaps in imaging access, especially for women with dense breast tissue and in clinics that lack skilled sonographers, by empowering primary care and OB/GYN providers with easy-to-use diagnostic tools.
• Ongoing research (the AUDIBLE study) is comparing ATUSA’s ability to detect and classify abnormal masses versus mammography and MRI, with involvement from leading medical organisations.
Australia
• Researchers in Perth, working with the Royal Women’s Hospital and University of Melbourne, have developed a non-invasive blood test that can accurately diagnose endometriosis, potentially cutting the long wait time of 6–8 years for diagnosis.
• The test uses advanced proteomics to analyse plasma proteins and identifies 10 protein biomarkers that strongly indicate the presence of endometriosis.
• Laparoscopic surgery, the traditional “gold standard” for diagnosis, is invasive, risky, and costly, whereas this new blood test could spare many patients from such procedures.
• Early and accurate blood-based diagnosis could significantly reduce the physical and emotional burden on patients, improving treatment timelines and quality of life for those with the condition.
• Professor Andrew Coats, scientific director of Australia’s Heart Research Institute, warns that dwindling government grant success rates are making medical research a “terrible career path.”
• The National Health and Medical Research Council’s 2025 “ideas grants” had a 92 % rejection rate, with only one in ten applications funded and half of the top‑rated proposals turned down.
• The Medical Research Future Fund now holds roughly $5 billion in unspent money, while the government disburses only $650 million annually instead of the planned $1 billion.
• Cross‑bench MPs and the Parliamentary Budget Office suggest increasing annual disbursements to as much as $1.4 billion, a move they say would not strain the fund’s $24.5 billion base.