The rapid advancement of digital technologies and recent global pandemic scenarios have led to a growing focus on how these technologies can enhance healthcare service delivery and workflow to address crises. Action plans that consolidate existing digital transformation programs are being reviewed to establish core infrastructure and foundations for sustainable healthcare solutions. Reforming health and social care to personalize home care, for example, can help avoid treatment in overcrowded acute hospital settings and improve the experiences and outcomes for both healthcare professionals and service users. In this information-intensive domain, addressing the interoperability challenge through standards-based roadmaps is crucial for enabling effective connections between health and social care services. This approach facilitates safe and trustworthy data workflows between different healthcare system providers. In this paper, we present a methodology for extracting, transforming, and loading data through a semi-automated process using a Common Semantic Standardized Data Model (CSSDM) to create personalized healthcare knowledge graph (KG). The CSSDM is grounded in the formal ontology of ISO 13940 ContSys and incorporates FHIR-based specifications to support structural attributes for generating KGs. We propose that the CSSDM facilitates data harmonization and linking, offering an alternative approach to interoperability. This approach promotes a novel form of collaboration between companies developing health information systems and cloud-enabled health services. Consequently, it provides multiple stakeholders with access to high-quality data and information sharing.

This Digital Health News industry roundup includes an IT award for the Department of Health and Social Care and Netcompany for the NHS Covid Pass, accreditation for an AI device and a virtual falls service keeping care home residents out of hospital. Digital health and AI company Empatica has received clearance of its Empatica Health Monitoring Platform by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The platform has been cleared for continuous data collection to monitor blood oxygen saturation during rest, peripheral skin temperature, activity associated with movement during sleep and electrodermal activity. Each digital biomarker is based on trained algorithms that analyse sensor data in one-minute intervals. Dr. Marisa Cruz, chief medical officer of Empatica, said: "This clearance represents a significant step forward for our scientific community. Patients, healthcare providers, and researchers deserve digital health products that are accurate, validated in diverse populations, and intuitive to use. "We are proud to have built a solution that accomplishes these goals, offering a high-quality and reliable digital health tool to scientists working to improve patient outcomes through research and clinical care." The company has also announced the closing of its Series B financing. The investment was led by Sanofi Venture and RA Capital Management with participation by Black Opal Ventures. Empatica intends to use the financing to expand its suite of digital biomarkers for use in both patient care and in clinical trials as digital endpoints. Cris De Luca, partner at Sanofi Ventures and newly-appointed board member at Empatica, said: "By gaining higher resolution into disease symptomology through novel digital measures and digital biomarkers in clinical and real-world settings, Empatica is unlocking the possibilities of early disease detection, enhanced treatment decisions, and improving quality of life for patients around the world." International IT services company, Netcompany, alongside the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) have won the Emerging Technology of the Year award in the Technology Excellence category of the 2022 UK IT Industry Awards. The two companies were recognised for their work on the NHS Covid Pass, which also saw them receive a highly commended in the Best Healthcare IT Project of the Year 2022. The win reflects the vital role that the NHS Covid Pass has played in the safe reopening of the country. It allows users to shared their Covid-19 status or vaccination status when travelling internationally. Richard Davies, UK country managing partner at Netcompany, said: "This award recognises our talented teams, expertise, and dedication towards creating technology solutions that help to improve the everyday lives of citizens.

In this blog, Dr Mani Hussain, Director of Primary and Community Care, talks about CQC's involvement in the multi-agency advice service on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) and Data-driven technologies have exciting potential to improve the quality of care for people using services. For example, hospitals are now using AI to support radiologists with their decision making. In diagnostics, AI can help analyse x-rays leading to the quick identification of abnormalities. In research, AI is used to analyse large swathes of data which helps to discover and validate new drugs.

NHSX has laid out its vision, approach and areas of focus for developing a new National Strategy for AI in Health and Social Care. The NHS AI Lab is currently working on a plan that will outline its ambitions for the'development, implementation, scaling and monitoring of AI-driven technologies' in the UK. The organisation has created a draft strategy to support the ultimate goal of deploying AI at scale, in an'effective' and'ethical' way. According to NHSX, its research will consist of three phases: research to understand the current digital health landscape; discussions with those who will use or feel the impact of the new technologies; and looking into possible'futures' for AI. A team of stakeholders, a selection of people involved in the development and deployment of AI in health, as well as potential users of the technologies, have formed a working group to help guide the development of the strategy.

UK researchers have secured government funding to study the use of artificial intelligence for breast cancer screening in NHS hospitals. The work builds on previous research which showed that artificial intelligence could be as effective as human radiologists in spotting breast cancer from X-ray images. Backed by funding through the Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award, the next stages of the project aim to further assess the feasibility of the AI system to see how the technology could be integrated into the national screening programme in the future to support clinicians. The partnership, which includes Imperial College London, Google Health, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, St George's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust builds on previous work, in which the researchers trained the algorithm on depersonalised patient data and mammograms from patients in the UK and US. The findings, published in Nature in January 2020, showed the AI system was able to correctly identify cancers from the images with a similar degree of accuracy to expert radiologists, and demonstrated potential to assist clinical staff in practice.

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Global tech giant Fujifilm has given Welsh healthcare professionals an exclusive first look at its latest medical innovation ahead of the product's global clinical launch. The Japanese multinational photography and imaging company, which is a pioneer in medical imaging and diagnostics equipment, previewed its new artificial intelligence (AI) software, which is integrated into a mobile radiography system, at an event hosted by Life Sciences Hub Wales. Flown in from Tokyo for the event, the FDR nano is a mobile X-ray unit that uses integrated AI technology to quickly identify and flag abnormalities that need further investigation. The product is the first Fujifilm AI-enabled mobile unit in Europe and is due to commence clinical trials in a UK hospital. The AI in the unit highlights suspicious areas on an image to the radiographer taking the X-ray using a heat map.

A delegation of members of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) visited three Finnish technological hubs to assess the potential benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence for our society. They stressed that all future developments must encompass three pillars: product safety, consumer trust, and solidarity in health and social care. Artificial intelligence applications can increase people's wellbeing, but the potential risks need to be taken seriously. The products that are emerging as a result of new technologies and the digital revolution are in general extremely helpful and can have a wide range of uses in all areas of our lives, from dispensing medicines to curing loneliness. However, they need to be handled with care, as they are not always as straightforward as they may seem.

A delegation of members of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) visited three Finnish technological hubs to assess the potential benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence for our society. They stressed that all future developments must encompass three pillars: product safety, consumer trust, and solidarity in health and social care. Artificial intelligence applications can increase people's wellbeing, but the potential risks need to be taken seriously. The products that are emerging as a result of new technologies and the digital revolution are in general extremely helpful and can have a wide range of uses in all areas of our lives, from dispensing medicines to curing loneliness. However, they need to be handled with care, as they are not always as straightforward as they may seem.

The contract between the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and ecommerce giant Amazon -- for a health information licensing partnership involving its Alexa voice AI -- has been released following a Freedom of Information request. The government announced the partnership this summer. But the date on the contract, which was published on the gov.uk contracts finder site months after the FOI was filed, shows the open-ended arrangement to funnel nipped-and-tucked health advice from the NHS' website to Alexa users in audio form was inked back in December 2018. The contract is between the UK government and Amazon US (Amazon Digital Services, Delaware) -- rather than Amazon UK. Nor is it a standard NHS Choices content syndication contract.