Telecare eNewsletter February 2016

Welcome to the February 2016 newsletter from the Telecare Learning and Improvement Network.

Our news service has been available since October 2005. Our Housing LIN and Telecare LIN membership database exceeds 40,000 people from around the world.

From January 2016 we are now back with a monthly Telecare LIN roundup as well as maintaining weekly headlines together with daily news via Twitter (follow @clarkmike and #TLINnews).

As in the past, we will be continuing to bring you an extensive curated coverage of digital health and technology enabled care references from the UK and around the world including telehealth, telecare, mobile health, telemedicine, ehealth, smart home technologies and Internet of Things. We will also be including more in the future on health informatics (including electronic health and care records), big data, artificial intelligence as well as health and care robotics.

Pressures on health and social care in the UK continue with a potential year end NHS deficit of over £2bn in England. Services are under continued pressure and although there are many vanguards and pioneers exploring new care models, there are few examples yet of major service transformations and the health tech focus continues to be more around digitising existing hospital-based systems often with disappointing results. On the digital front, there were more technology and smartphone launches from Mobile World Congress and there is a growing interest in virtual reality, robotics and artificial intelligence. Cybersecurity remains a significant issue as health and other personal data gets hacked. Of particular interest in the future could be the work being carried out by McLaren F1 and Google Deepmind with the NHS. A surprise weekend story via Jeremy Hunt re-focused on the 'paperless NHS' but it was difficult to identify what technology investment could be covered by additional funding. There was a recent launch of seven NHS testbed sites, six more vanguards and a major digital health initiative commenced in London. We've got coverage and links from recent conferences and announcements from Nesta and TSA as well as an article on the 'AT Home' campaign in West Midlands. Upcoming events include the Digital Health and Care Congress in July and the TSA Summit in May as well as the Housing LIN annual conference on 11 March 2016.