Stepping Hill Hospital Announced as SPARK TSL Lighthouse

Stepping Hill Hospital, part of Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, has replaced its bedside units with state-of-the art devices running a full range of information, engagement, communications and productivity apps, to demonstrate the potential of digital technology in the NHS.

Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport has gone live with the first lighthouse deployment of SPARK TSL's Fusion platform in the UK.

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First Therapy Chatbot Trial Shows AI can Provide 'Gold-Standard' Care

Dartmouth researchers conducted the first clinical trial of a therapy chatbot powered by generative AI and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants' symptoms, according to results published in NEJM AI, a journal from the publishers of the New England Journal of Medicine.

People in the study also reported they could trust and communicate with the system, known as Therabot, to a degree that is comparable to working with a mental-health professional.

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DeepSeek: The "Watson" to Doctors - from Assistance to Collaboration

DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built on deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Its core products include the DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 models. Leveraging an efficient Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, multimodal data fusion capabilities, and significantly reduced training costs (over 90% lower than comparable models), DeepSeek achieves performance on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini.

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Who's to Blame When AI Makes a Medical Error?

Assistive artificial intelligence technologies hold significant promise for transforming health care by aiding physicians in diagnosing, managing, and treating patients. However, the current trend of assistive AI implementation could actually worsen challenges related to error prevention and physician burnout, according to a new brief published in JAMA Health Forum.

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DMEA sparks: The Future of Digital Health Starts Here

8 - 10 April 2025, Berlin, Germany.
Digitalization is considered one of the key strategies for addressing the shortage of skilled workers - but the digital health sector also needs qualified employees to make a decisive contribution to the digitalization of the healthcare system. DMEA sparks was created to connect these students, graduates and young professionals with companies.

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Research Shows AI Technology Improves Parkinson's Diagnoses

Existing research indicates that the accuracy of a Parkinson's disease diagnosis hovers between 55% and 78% in the first five years of assessment. That's partly because Parkinson's sibling movement disorders share similarities, sometimes making a definitive diagnosis initially difficult.

Although Parkinson’s disease is a well-recognized illness, the term can refer to a variety of conditions, ranging from idiopathic Parkinson's, the most common type, to other movement disorders like multiple system atrophy Parkinsonian variant and progressive supranuclear palsy.

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AI in Healthcare: How do We Get from Hype to Reality, Safely and Effectively?

The Highland Marketing advisory board met to consider the government's enthusiasm for AI. To date, healthcare has mostly experimented with decision support tools, and their impact on the NHS and UK plc has been mixed. But the big, new idea is generative AI; and members felt some careful thought is needed about how and where to adopt it.

Ask Google's Gemini assistant how many articles have been published on AI in the UK over the past year, and the response is that the data is "too vast and dispersed" to say, but "it's a very active area of discussion."

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AI Tool Helps Predict Who will Benefit from Focal Therapy for Prostate Cancer

A study led by UCLA investigators shows that artificial intelligence (AI) could play a key role in improving treatment outcomes for men with prostate cancer by helping physicians determine who is most likely to benefit from partial gland cryoablation, a minimally invasive procedure that treats localized prostate tumors.

Researchers found that an AI tool called Unfold AI, developed by researchers at UCLA and Avenda Health, accurately estimates prostate tumor volume and helps identify patients with a higher chance of successful treatment.

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New AI Tool Accelerates Disease Treatments

University of Virginia School of Medicine scientists have created a computational tool to accelerate the development of new disease treatments. The tool goes beyond current artificial intelligence (AI) approaches by identifying not just which patient populations may benefit but also how the drugs work inside cells.

The researchers have demonstrated the tool's potential by identifying a promising candidate to prevent heart failure, a leading cause of death in the United States and around the world.

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Accelerating NHS Digital Maturity: Paper to Digital is Only the Beginning for South Tees Hospitals

Digitised clinical noting at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is creating efficiencies for busy doctors and nurses. The trust’s CCIO Dr Andrew Adair, deputy CCIO Dr John Greenaway, and digital business change manager Niki Idle explain the impact so far and why this crucial component of digital transformation, delivered in partnership with Alcidion, lays the foundations for AI and smart technology.

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