South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has signed a major deal with smart health technology provider Alcidion. An entire range of new technology capabilities will alleviate pressure for busy NHS professionals, helping to automate routine tasks, enhance patient safety and improve the delivery of care, whilst also fully harnessing the trust’s existing IT.

Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has deployed DXC Technology's (NYSE:DXC) cloud-based Clinical Aide mobile application, which both improves secure access to electronic patient medical records and increases patient and hospital staff safety by limiting unneeded contact in higher-risk areas such as COVID-19 wards and intensive care units.

Compass app to help NHS trusts prevent hospital-acquired acute kidney injury and pneumonia - both of which cause harm to COVID-19 patients and can be fatal. Hospitals could alleviate pressure on ICU, save hundreds of lives and reduce costs associated with critical care by millions of pounds.

GPs and patients are to benefit from a new softphone app that will eliminate almost all the "hidden cost" of calls for remote consultations and is forecast to save the NHS as much as £20 million over three years.

The app will mean patient calls to their GP are free and in turn reduce the cost to GPs and practices for outgoing calls by around 75%.

Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services has been given the go-ahead to run one of the new NHS lighthouse laboratories. It will form part of NHS Test and Trace, joining Britain's largest network of diagnostic testing facilities increasing coronavirus testing capacity by tens of thousands.

The new laboratory at Bracknell Healthspace, Brants Bridge, will use the CliniSys WinPath Enterprise laboratory information system to efficiently manage up to 40,000 tests per day when running at full capacity.

NHS England and NHS Improvement have signed a new national agreement that is rapidly connecting prisons in England with specialists in their local hospital through a video collaboration platform provided by health tech company Visionable.

Instead of coordinating physical visits to hospital - which can cost hundreds of pounds - prisons will now be able to use Visionable's technology to allow prisoners to securely speak to consultants remotely whenever possible and appropriate.

Andy Kinnear is to join Ethical Healthcare Consulting, a growing community interest company that is proud to be the only not-for-profit digital health consultancy in the UK.

The former chair of BCS Health and Care and director of digital transformation at NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit, will become partnerships director at Ethical, which is expanding by bringing together high calibre like-minded experts.