PULSE

By PULSE+ITHealth & Fitness Technology

PULSE episodes

August 06 How the UK Professionalised Its Digital Health Workforce, with Jane Dwelly
This week on Pulse: Amplify, healthcare's digital future won't be built by technology - it will be built by people.

In this episode, Louise and George are joined by Jane Dwelly, Vice President International at CHIME and Chair of the Federation for Informatics Professionals (FedIP), to discuss why professional recognition, leadership and workforce capability are critical to healthcare’s future, especially as healthcare enters the AI era.

They explore the UK's landmark move to recognise digital health professionals, what other countries can learn, how AI is reshaping workforce skills, and whether the future could include internationally recognised standards for digital health professionals.

Connect with Jane on LinkedIn

Resources:
FedIP, Federation for Informatics Professionals Link
CHIME CXO Summit, September @Cambridge Link
CHIME membership Link
Professional Membership for the NHS Digital, Data and Technology Workforce – NHS Link

VisitPulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
34 min
July 30 Trust, AI Governance Theatre & the First Big Health AI Lawsuit
This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George explore one question that underpins the future of digital health: how do we build trust?

They begin with Australia's latest healthcare cyberattack and New Zealand's response to one of theirs, asking if cybersecurity should be considered a patient safety issue rather than simply an IT problem.

The discussion then turns to the World Health Organization's first AI Readiness Assessment for Europe and what it reveals about the gap between rapid AI adoption and the governance needed to support it safely.

The conversation moves to healthcare investment, examining Rock Health's latest funding report, new evidence on the economics of AI, and whether venture capital is backing the innovations that will deliver the greatest value for patients.

Louise and George also discuss how patients are already using AI, drawing on new research from Microsoft and the Commonwealth Fund that reveals where people trust AI, and where they still want human care.

Finally, they explore one of the first major lawsuits involving ChatGPT and alleged medical harm, asking how accountability will evolve as consumers increasingly rely on generative AI for health advice.

Recommendations:
Clinicians – be part of the research into clinician use of AI, open globally Link
Athens Digital Health Week, 23–25 February 2027, Royal Olympic Hotel, Athens Link

Resources:
Action Plan aims to strengthen Health NZ digital security, Pulse+IT (Reesh Lyon) — Link
Health NZ Action Plan - Link
Partnered Health cyber incident statement — Link
WHO Europe statement: Govern AI in health before the gaps become irreversible — Link
WHO report: AI is reshaping health systems — state of readiness across the European Union — Link
Rock Health H1 2026 Funding and Market Overview — Link
A systematic review of economic evidence of artificial intelligence in healthcare, Health Policy (Schmidt, Carter, McGuire, Mossialos, van Kessel) — Link
2025 Global Women's Health Investment Hit A Record, But U.S. Investors Curb Their Enthusiasm, Forbes (Geri Stengel) — Link
Global analysis of country-level factors associated with chatbot usage for health, Nature Health — Link
Patients' Perspectives on AI in Primary Care, Commonwealth Fund — Link
ChatGPT Led to a Man's Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims, The New York Times — Link

With Thanks to Datacom:
Download the Executive Briefing Playbook Link

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44 min
July 23 Australia's Healthcare AI Roadmap, the PM's Announcement, and the Race for Healthcare's Front Door, with Prof Enrico Coiera
This week on Pulse: Amplify, Louise and George sit down with Professor Enrico Coiera - founder of the Australian Alliance for AI in Healthcare and lead author of Don't Walk. Run., the third National Policy Roadmap for AI in Healthcare.
Enrico walks us through the Roadmap's 28 recommendations across eight priority areas, and we put it up against the Albanese government's new Office of AI and the national AI standards due to be legislated in early 2027 - asking whether a whole-of-government framework can do justice to a sector as complex as health. We also get into sovereign capability, the arrival of powerful open-weight models like Kimi K3, and what happens when the hyperscalers become the front door to healthcare.
With Thanks to Datacom:
Download the Executive Briefing Playbook Link

Download ‘Don’t Walk. Run.’ here

Connect with Professor Coiera on LinkedIn

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
36 min
July 16 The Tech Works. The System Doesn't: Portugal Buys AI Physio, the First AI Complaints Land, and the Wild West of Health Apps
This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George look at what happens when digital health stops being a pilot and starts being a system decision — and why, again and again, the technology isn't the hard part.

Portugal Buys AI Physiotherapy for an Entire Country — Portugal's National Health Service has contracted Sword Health to make AI-supported physiotherapy available to all 10 million citizens, free after a prescription, prompting the question: are governments shifting from buying AI software to buying AI-delivered healthcare?

AI and Accountability: The First Complaints Land — The UK's first complaints about clinicians' inappropriate use of AI have reached professional regulators, arriving well before the evidence base and accountability frameworks are ready.

95% of Health Apps Have No Verifiable Regulatory Approval — Rudolf Wagner's analysis found that of nearly 96,000 apps qualifying as Software as a Medical Device, 95% had no verifiable CE marking or FDA authorisation, leaving consumers with no easy way to know what they're actually using.

Doctors Want Wearable Data, But Can't Use It — A new AMA(US) survey found 97% of physicians would review data from a patient's wearable, but no more than 6% have actually integrated it, blocked by missing standards, workflow fit, reimbursement and liability.

Virtual Care Could Transform Residential Aged Care — Australian researchers found virtual care between aged care homes and GPs improves access and reduces unnecessary hospital visits, but is undermined by poor integration, unreliable networks and limited staff training — the technology works, the system around it doesn't.

With Thanks to Datacom:
Download the Executive Briefing Playbook Link

Resources:
Sword Health partners with Portugal's National Health Service Link
First complaints made over clinician use of AI, HSJ via Patient Safety Learning Hub Link
Ensuring the clinical impact of medical artificial intelligence, Andreoletti et al., Lancet Digital HealthLink
Analysis of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) Compliance in App Store Applications, Rudolf Wagner Link
Docs unable to harness wearables data, survey finds, Axios Link
Virtual care could benefit residential homes – study, Pulse+IT Link
Virtual care in residential aged care homes, Journal of Medical Internet ResearchLink

Recommendations:
Clinicians – be part of the research into clinician use of AI, open globally Link
Standards Australia telehealth and virtual care standard Link
There's An AI For That (TAAFT) newsletter Link
Age-Friendly Futures newsletter, George Gouzounis Link
"Welcome to the Land of the Free" — World Cup song by Jason Stills Link
Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
49 min
July 09 How Hugo Campos Built the Healthcare Tools the System Never Gave Him
This week on Pulse: Amplify, Louise and George sit down with patient advocate and AI Champion, Hugo Campos.

Hugo Campos has spent nearly two decades fighting for a simple principle: patients should have access to the data generated by their own bodies. After discovering that his implanted cardiac defibrillator was sending information to clinicians and manufacturers—but not to him—he became one of the world's leading advocates for patient data rights.

In this episode, Hugo explains why generative AI changes everything. Rather than waiting for hospitals or vendors to build better tools, patients can now create their own AI-powered applications, analyse their own health data and ask questions that matter to them.

We discuss patient-directed AI, the rise of personalised "N-of-1" healthcare, critical AI health literacy, and why the next wave of healthcare innovation may come from patients themselves—not institutions.

Connect with Hugo on LinkedIn

Resources – open source, freely available by Hugo:
https://caihl.org/ (framework of critical ai health literacy)
https://openkp.org/ (mcp server for access to provider data)
https://myheartdata.org/ (19 years of Hugo’s own echo data)
https://hugotronic.com/ (longitudinal data from Hugo’s implantable defibrillator)
https://endothelial.org/ (explains endothelial dysfunction, built for Dave)

Hugo’s newest app:
https://hugoscore.org/ (evaluates patient-facing health apps throught he CAIHL lens)

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
35 min
July 02 Shadow AI: When Doctors, Patients and Robots Move Faster Than the System
This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise reports in from a heatwave in the French Alps while George braces for a Sydney winter — before the pair work through five stories on a single throughline: AI adoption by clinicians and patients is racing ahead of the institutions meant to govern it.
They discuss why more than half of UK GPs are now using generative AI in clinical practice, how an AI system analysing a routine ECG helped save a patient's life, the emergence of agentic AI capable of managing clinical workflows, a robotic platform accelerating cancer drug discovery, and an Australian-developed wearable "stethoscope sticker" designed to continuously monitor heart and lung sounds.

Resources:
Half of UK GPs Now Use AI Blease et al Link
AI Flagged a Failing Heart Hartman et al Nature Link
Agentic AI Comes to Medicine Topol, Ground Truths Link
AIME, Lievin et al Nature Link
MIRA, Ferber et al Nature Link
UpDoc FDA-clearance announcement — PRNewswire Link
Shrestha, Innolitics Link
Persistern Cells, Sun et al., ScienceAdvances Link
The "Stethoscope Sticker" Dang et al., Link

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
45 min
June 25 Is the NHS Ready for the AI-Powered Patient? with Pritesh Mistry
This week on Pulse: Amplify, Louise and George sit down with Pritesh Mistry, Fellow for Digital Technologies at The King's Fund, to dig into his provocative analysis Is the NHS Ready for the AI-Powered Patient?

Pritesh argues the NHS is no longer the centre of a person's health experience, but one participant in a much larger ecosystem - and he unpacks the three forces driving that shift: direct-to-consumer innovation, generational change, and a growing role for employers.

Pritesh asks if ‘NHS exceptionalism’, the belief that any care delivered outside the NHS must be re-validated within it, is responsible in an era of resource constraint. Pritesh, Louise and George explore what it really takes to share authority and clinical risk with better-informed patients, the sycophancy problem with consumer AI, and whether these tools will widen or narrow inequalities. Pritesh makes the case for building "AI readiness" as a core public capability rather than hardwiring rigid plans.

Connect with Pritesh on LinkedIn

Resources:
Pritesh Mistry, Is the NHS Ready for the AI-Powered Patient?, The King's Fund (26 May 2026) Link
Keep Britain Working Review: Final Report, GOV.UK Link
Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England, GOV.UK Link

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
31 min
June 18 The Robots Took the Internet: Now They're Coming for Medicine
This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George race through a very AI-heavy fortnight — from antibiotics and the menstrual cycle to whether "medical AI" is even a category worth defending.

AI and Science. A Nature feature on AI accelerating antibiotic discovery (millions of molecules screened in silico, though only a tiny fraction can actually be synthesised), paired with a UK Biobank study mapping 198 proteins that fluctuate across the menstrual cycle — reframing it as a whole-body biological rhythm, not just a reproductive one.

Do We Even Need Medical AI? A NYU study finds frontier general models outperforming purpose-built clinical tools like OpenEvidence and UpToDate — with an important caveat that no patient outcomes were measured. Paired with Apollo, Harvard's foundation model trained on 25 billion clinical events to forecast individual patient trajectories.

What If AI Makes Healthcare More Expensive? David Brailer argues in Health Affairs that AI won't lower US health costs because it amplifies the incentives already baked into the payment system — accelerating both better care and billing extraction.

The AI Equity Divide. A WHO-led initiative (GI-AI4H) and its RISE framework tackle the risk that AI widens global health inequities when governance lags behind deployment.

Governing AI — Local and Professional. Victoria's Department of Health sets top-down standards for AI across public health services, while the American Medical Association champions "augmented intelligence" with clinicians at the centre — two very different models of governance.

Plus: the robots now account for 57% of internet traffic, and a shout-out to Daniel McCabe's impact on Australian digital health.

Resources:
AI is taking on antibiotic resistance Link
Plasma proteomic signature of the menstrual cycle Link
Generalist vs clinical LLMs (OpenEvidence, UpToDate) — NYU study (Vishwanath, Oermann et al.) Link
APOLLO healthcare foundation model Link
Why AI Will Accelerate Health Care Inflation — David Brailer, Health Affairs Link
Global Initiative on AI for Health (GI-AI4H) and the RISE framework — npj Health Systems Link
AI guidance for Victorian Public Health Services — Pulse+IT Link
Augmented Intelligence in Medicine — American Medical Association Link
Ida Tin — global challenge on continuous hormone monitoring Link

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
41 min
June 11 The Data Behind Europe's Quiet Digital Health Powerhouse, with Inma Rodríguez ACCIÓ
What can the rest of the world learn from one of Europe's most impressive digital health ecosystems? This week on Pulse: Amplify, Louise and George sit down with Inma Rodríguez, Market Intelligence Manager at ACCIÓ (Catalonia Trade & Investment), who led the Digital Health in Catalonia Report 2026 — a rare regional analysis that benchmarks Catalonia against the US, Asia and the rest of Europe.

Inma unpacks where Europe really sits in the global market (and whether it's keeping pace or falling behind), why digital health growth is settling into a more mature ~5% a year, and whether Europe's focus on regulation, interoperability and data governance is a brake or a long-term advantage.

She explains how Catalonia became the 4th region in the world for foreign health-innovation investment, the role anchor investors like AstraZeneca play, and why 65% of the region's digital health companies are building with AI.

The conversation also turns to the honest gap revealed in Catalonia's hospital survey — strong ambition, moderate maturity — and the cultural, budget and patient-habit barriers slowing real-world implementation. Inma closes with the seven trends shaping 2026, why AI, personalised medicine and health data spaces top her list, and the 2030 headline she most wants to see.

A data-rich conversation for anyone who wants evidence, not hype, about where digital health is heading.

Stryker Vocera's Initial Delays Diagnosis Quiz Link
Check out the ACCIO Report here
Connect with Inma on LinkedIn

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
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Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
25 min
June 04AI, Patients, Prediction and the Foothills of the Singularity
In this Hot Topics episode, Louise joins from London after an unexpected encounter with the UK healthcare system, while George reports back from the Digital Health Festival.
The pair discuss New Zealand's $450 million digital health and cyber investment, a major new King's College London study showing one in seven people are already using AI instead of seeing a doctor, Demis Hassabis' bold prediction that we're entering the "foothills of the singularity", and two emerging AI approaches aimed at predicting serious disease before symptoms appear.

Plus, a shout-out to Australian health tech company ThinkMD.ai for winning international recognition at the World Health Assembly.

Topics covered:
New Zealand's renewed investment in digital health and cyber security
Why patients are increasingly turning to AI before healthcare professionals
Public trust, regulation and the future of clinical AI
Google's vision for AI-driven scientific discovery
Predicting liver disease years earlier using historical pathology data
Longevity science and AI-powered disease prediction
What healthcare needs to do to keep pace with accelerating technological change
Resources:
Stryker Vocera's Initial Delays Diagnosis Quiz Link
Digital Health Workforce Census (opens 1 May, ANZ) Link
Hospital Sant Pau, Barcelona Link
The Use of AI in UK Healthcare Report, King’s College London Link
WHO endorses precision medicine resolution Link
Congrats to ThinkMD.ai and Dr Jackie Rabec – Pulse+IT Link

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT
Follow us on BlueSky Louise | George | Pulse+IT
Send us your questions [email protected]
Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric
38 min

About PULSE

From the publisher's feed

PULSE, the podcast, produced by Pulse+IT and hosted by digital health legends Louise Schaper and George Margelis, is an enlightening, entertaining look at global digital health trends and current…