BMJ Future Health
February 2026

Good ideas are not enough. This issue explores what it takes for digital health tools to work in practice.

BMJ Future Health, from BMJ Group, brings together clinicians, industry leaders, and patients to interrogate the evidence, experience, and ideas behind healthcare innovation.

Community spotlight: Meet Alison Potts

In this episode of the BMJ Future Health podcast, hosted by Dr Cat Schuster-Bruce, community editor at BMJ Future Health, and Dr Maxine Mackintosh, associate editor at BMJ Digital Health & AI, we hear from Alison Potts, who lives with severe sight loss and epilepsy following a brain injury. She describes how Meta smart glasses and Amazon's Alexa have helped her navigate public transport and regain independence.

In the same episode, Iain Hennessey, consultant paediatric and neonatal surgeon and clinical director of innovation at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, Liverpool, UK, explains why gamification matters in healthcare, drawing on tools such as Minecraft to engage young patients - and argues these approaches can have value for adults too.

The panel also discusses the cost of health technology, and how to prevent innovation from widening health inequalities.

Filmed at the BMJ Future Health event, 2025. Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

Ask the editor: 60 seconds with Dr Felix Holl

BMJ Group recently launched BMJ Connections Digital Health & AI, an open-access journal that sits alongside BMJ Digital Health & AI. 

Both journals publish original research, but the Connections journal has scope to publish more — including negative results and specialist studies — from medicine, computer science, public health, and related fields. Dr Felix Holl is the journal’s editor.

Holl is deputy head of the DigiHealth Institute at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences in Germany, where he leads research on digital health innovations - with a particular focus on global health, humanitarian, and disaster settings. He chairs the global health informatics working group of the American Medical Informatics Association and deploys in the field as a disaster response delegate for the German Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and WHO.

Why did you want to lead this journal? I've seen too many great digital health and AI ideas die in pilots or fail in real-world care. I wanted to help build a journal that connects innovation with evidence, implementation, and real impact — not just shiny tech. We need fewer demos, more outcomes.

How will it contribute to the digital transformation of healthcare? By putting real-world relevance first: what actually works, what scales, and what doesn't. We prioritise evaluation, implementation, and learning from failure — across different health systems and contexts. The goal is transformation that improves care, not just tools.

What keeps you busy beyond work? My next dive. I've been scuba diving in over 25 countries — and the underwater world is still the best offline mode I know.

What we're reading

Your monthly reading list to keep you up-to-date on digital health and AI research and trends. 

Features, Analysis and Editorials

Research

Open call for digital health and AI papers

If you’re working on a relevant project, we want to hear from you. Explore our calls for papers. 

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