This Digital Health News industry roundup includes an Innovate UK Smart Award for a smart inhaler tracker, details on the digital transformation programme for Research Data Scotland and Cera's commitment to reduce hospitalisations with its digital healthcare approach. Customer analysis of a care home admin platform has revealed that it can save a significant number of hours in admin time for care homes. The CoolCare software focuses on making admin more efficient and more profitable. Its most recent analysis found that many of its customers were seeing results above pre-pandemic levels, including above-national increases in weekly fees, occupancy and private payer ratios. With increased occupancy, comes more admin.

The pandemic accelerated a phenomenon that was already taking place across industry: digital transformation. Lockdowns and similar changes in our behaviours drove a massive increase in demand for online services and this demand is now unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels. In reaction to this, businesses of all shapes and sizes are striving to make their existing business models increasingly automated and digital-first in a bid to avoid being disrupted. They are also disrupting themselves, changing their ways of working using data and technology in a bid to improve their products and services, remain competitive and create new markets. Central to successful digital transformation is the effective use of data.

For Wärtsilä, a Finnish headquartered firm that employs around 18,000 workers and which manufactures and services power sources and other equipment in the marine and energy markets, digital business transformation is a very practical thing. In fact, back in December 2016, Marco claimed that Wärtsilä was "embarking on one of the boldest, innovative and most exciting digital transformation programmes in the industrial, marine and energy sectors." The company is not the most famous of firms, unless you work in the marine or renewable energy business, you may have never heard of it, but in fact, roughly one in two marine vessels in the world are either serviced, powered, navigated or propelled by Wartsila's technology. But what about today, how is the digital business transformation programme performing? "One of the things we've now decided to do is create a sort of digital boot camp, a digital academy, with a leadership programme on what it means to lead in a digitally-enabled business. Marco Ryan, a veteran in digital business transformation, likens this process to a digital onion, and compares the old way of doing things to the Parthenon. "At Wärtsilä, we had over 300 ideas submitted by colleagues in the last 18 months, of which about 50 or 60 have actually come into our incubation centres.