Sup gang. So Claude’s Fable model got released this week cueing the usual exhaustion and overwhelm from being told that “this model changes everything.” I can confirm that for most it has changed nothing. Happy people are still very happy. And chronically unproductive workaholics now have another tool and another reason to say how busy they are. Excellent.

Here’s a tip though… rather than burning through some planet-warming tokens for the sheer heck of it, connect Claude to your emails, Slack, call transcripts, CRM and anything else you can think of and ask Fable to “look through all my connectors and tell me what you can build to make my life easier.” If you’re lucky, something on there might be useful. If not, recycle that tip on LinkedIn for a few likes either way.

Anyway, this week, 505,000 NHS staff are getting Copilot and the MPS (medical defence lawyers) immediately asked who gets sued when it goes wrong. Also, Apple has finally noticed that half its users go through the menopause.

News Bites 🥪

📎 The NHS just gave 505,000 staff a Copilot: Strong start. NHS England confirmed that it’s rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and support staff. Remember the trial thing they did before? 30,000 people, 90 orgs, saved staff an average of 43 minutes a day… yeah, this follows that. Full rollout due by October. A minor point is that the same trial found Copilot occasionally hallucinated incorrect medication dosages in draft letters and tripped over niche clinical terminology, but hey, it’s being rolled out at ludicrous scale, so I’m sure that’s sorted.

⚖️ And here’s who gets sued when the Copilot is wrong: And right on cue, the Medical Protection Society said the NHS could be sued for negligence when an AI tool gets it wrong, which leaves clinicians as (wait for it) the “liability sink” for systems they didn’t build, train or choose. Awesome. Surprisingly enough, “liability sink” is only the 14th most ridiculous term used in recent years to describe the people that go to work in sh** conditions for sh** pay and save your and your family’s lives. The top 13?

• Militant. Daily Mail, Wes Streeting.

• Self-indulgent. Independent, Wes Streeting.

• Dangerous. Independent, same man.

• Juvenile delinquents. Yep, actual phrase, Independent.

• Workshy. Daily Mail.

• Greedy and entitled. Daily Mail.

• Bungling. Mail Online.

• Perverted. Mail Online.

• “Lucky” to work part-time. Telegraph.

• Lazy. Oxford study analysing literature, published in BJGP

• Selfish. Same study

• Sexually disinhibited. Unbelievably, this isn’t a joke, it’s the same study.

• Violent. Same study, the note it ends on.

Can’t think why they’re leaving the NHS. Can you?

💰 Semble raises £30m to glue outpatients together: Not the actual people, we obviously mean the tech. Whopper of a Series C here for one interoperable platform that plugs into 1,200-odd external tools (diagnostics, billing, labs). They reckon more than 10 million patients (roughly 1/6 people in the UK), have now received care from a clinician using it. Pigeon has a soft spot for the unglamorous plumbing of healthcare, because the plumbing is usually where it all goes wrong. Interoperability getting a £30m cheque instead of a strongly worded strategy document? We’ll take it.

💃 Apple’s Health app discovers the menopause exists: At WWDC this week, Apple announced that its Health app is adding perimenopause and menopause support to its existing cycle-tracking feature, which, you know, is double edged. On one hand, a $trillion company finally building for a demographic the entire industry spent two decades ignoring is a genuine win, and their phenomenal distribution makes it meaningful. On the other, it feels like women’s health startups have been screaming into the void about exactly this for at least a decade. Is there going to be any clinical depth? Who knows. The bar has been raised by the founders and teams we talk about here often, so let’s see what happens.

🩺 Joyvié raises £771k to fix a problem nobody wants to talk about: Faecal incontinence affects around 656 million people worldwide and has seen pretty much zero product innovation in decades. What’s on the market now traps stool against the skin (causing breakdown, infection and a quiet loss of dignity), but Joyvié’s patent-pending design captures it in a disposable pouch, claiming around 90% less skin contact and 70% faster changes in early testing. Founder Zoe Robson built it after watching her father lose his dignity to a nappy in his final weeks. Exactly the kind of unglamorous, high-burden, carers-shoulder-most-of-it problem that we love to skip in favour of another longevity app. Pigeon is firmly in this nest. More of this, please.

🏥 01Health raises €12.9m to drag specialist care out of the hospital: London’s 01Health (previously 32co) has banked a €12.9m ($15m) Series A to scale a platform that lets local clinics deliver specialist care that normally lives in hospitals and big-city centres. It’s a fascinating model and I looked into it in detail for Pigeon insider. It’s founded by former NHS doctor (and ex-BCG) Dr Sonia Szamocki, (who I also had on The Healthtech Podcast) and it’s launching as a standalone product other clinics can license, with US trials underway. One to watch if you’ve ever been referred by your GP and the appointment you waited months for took 2 seconds, which left you wondering “what a waste.”

And finally…

🍫Rem3dy Health raises €16m for personalised nutrition (and, er, pet health): Birmingham’s Rem3dy Health, parent of personalised-nutrition brand Nourished, has raised €16m (£14m) to push into the US, MENA and India. They’re also moving into, and Pigeon promises this is real, personalised health solutions for pets. We have questions. Mostly about the dog’s macros. Jokes aside, a regional UK scale-up closing a strategic round in this climate is no small thing, and given my brummy routes I’m glad we have something to be proud of alongside being voted worst regional accent with a net score of minus 53. People actually went out of their way to vote us down. Bit harsh.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s edition looks at two separate ultrasound AI companies that I recently had on The Healthtech Podcast. The founders are from completely different backgrounds, but both companies have great traction, great tech, regulatory approval and could each be generationally important.

For investors, founders and buyers, this one has everything about the ultrasound AI market that you need to know.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week I sat down with THE Professor Shafi Ahmed and we had a superb chat about at what it actually takes to innovate inside a system designed to resist change. He also shared from his perspective what is was like streaming a live colectomy on Google Glass to 14,500 students in 118 countries and how that experience transformed surgical innovation. Whopper episode.

Also a whopper episode. Deborah Cohen, the award winning, medically qualified broadcaster, journalist and editor, joins host Annabel for a discussion exploring how social media has become a major source of health information (right up our street) and how it is reshaping the way medical ideas, diagnoses, and treatments are promoted and consumed.

Resources 📚

🧭 Curious about a move into healthtech?: For any clinicians weighing up a career in healthtech, Dr Yath Prem has written a whopping 105 pages covering how the ecosystem works, translating clinical experience into business language, CVs, interviews, salary and equity, and 50 UK companies to follow. And he walked the walk… (FY2 to senior clinical product role in under four years). Pigeon readers get 25% off with the code SOMX.

Events 📅

Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit) and 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of 65 senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation, and risk in one room, no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The Forum that follows across 25-26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.

Healthtech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
🇬🇧 London
An in-person event in London focusing on healthcare technology innovations and networking opportunities.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🔌 Technical Product Manager, Integration, Heidi - Heidi doesn’t need much of an intro. This role owns the integration layer that makes all of it actually talk to Epic, Cerner, Athena and the rest without forcing a single clinician to think about FHIR. If you understand why EMR write-back is where good healthtech goes to die, and you'd rather build a framework than firefight bespoke connectors for three regions at once, this is the job worth having.

💞 Head of Growth, Hertility - Hertility’s at-home hormone and fertility testing has cut the wait for some diagnoses from nine years to six days, and now they want a growth leader to own the entire DTC engine across testing, clinical services, subscriptions and the app. Move quickly though, applications close Friday 19th June.

🧮 Head of Data ,Semble - Fresh off that £30m payday, they’re hiring someone to own data strategy. Real scale, genuinely messy real-world clinical data, and a company with the funding to actually do something with it. Expect a bit of competition for this one. If you do get an interview. Check out my podcast episode with Christoph, the co-founder and CEO.

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

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Hi friends, me again. Guess what? Another big week in healthtech. An online NHS Trust with a bloke from Tesco in charge, Microsoft and the Mayo did a thing, Korea and the US did a thing, and some founders just did a Series E and probably laughed as they spent the number in your pitch deck on lunch. (That’s a joke, they’re probably very nice people with a fantastic legal team).

News Bites 🥪

📱 England's first new NHS trust in over a decade is, essentially, a website: What a start… the PM trailed it last September and we’re now official… the Online NHS Trust exists, with former Tesco and Apple retail boss John Browett in the chair. There are 8.5 million virtual appointments over three years for the likes of menopause, recurring UTIs and iron deficiency anaemia, all routed through the NHS App once your GP refers you. Sensible enough. On the board you’ve also got Neko Health's Global Medical Director Nikki Kanani, plus an ex-LoveFilm and graze.com founder and a clutch of consumer-tech NEDs. Reads more Silicon Roundabout than Stevenage General, but hey, call me a sellout if you want, but we complain enough about stagnant thinking, bureaucracy, waiting times and all the rest of it… Some people with a north star pointing towards customer service might be absolutely ideal. Why not?
<Awaits multiple reasons in the comments, but I’m here for it>

🩺 26 women’s health technologies are now heading toward NHS pilots: The Ripple Women’s Digital Health Challenge, delivered through Cogniss, the Health Innovation Network, and Amazon Web Services, used to support 2 innovations. Now it’s 26 and they’re all patient-facing digital tools for underserved areas of women’s health. Some epic companies in here like MenoSaathi (menopause support for South Asian women), Jalititi (multilingual breast health for Black women), and Gracefully (bereavement support for maternity staff). Several are now in pilot discussions with NHS orgs and they plan to create a women’s health portfolio for NHS organisations to evaluate and procure collectively. Excellent.

🤖 Microsoft and Mayo Clinic announced a frontier AI model for healthcare: Announced at Microsoft Build on Tuesday (and a lot on Linkedin ever since then), Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI now hooks up with Mayo Clinic’s longitudinal dataset of over 60 billion medical records from 320 million patients. The model’s going to be be owned by Mayo, distributed via Azure Foundry APIs, and it’s described as supporting “the broadest scope of clinical reasoning.” Things not mentioned (hence we’re quite unsure of): benchmarks, pricing, regulatory status, peer-reviewed evidence and external release timeline. Once I hear about some of those, I’ll allow myself to get more hyped. Until then, I’ll keep checking Linkedin. Sounds cool though.

🧪 Seoul National University Hospital and Harvard built a virtual hospital to test medical AI before it touches real patients: SNUH and Harvard Medical School have created the Clinical Environment Simulator, which unfortunately isn’t a gamified VR version of medical school, but fortunately is a framework for testing LLM-based medical AI in a realistic simulated environment before deployment. It uses a Patient Engine that generates virtual symptom trajectories based on specialist-defined disease templates and real EMR data, and a Hospital Engine that replicates real workflow conditions including bed status, staff availability, and resource allocation. You can trigger crisis scenarios and the AI’s timing decisions affect patient outcomes in the simulation before anyone uses it in the real world. Would be very cool to see them create a live leaderboard of how all the LLMs are doing (like the above).

💰 Garner Health closes $100M Series E at $2.74 billion, twice its valuation from three months ago: US care navigation startup Garner Health has raised $100m in a Series E led by Index Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures alongside (what a list, by the way). The model uses over 60 billion medical records to score physicians on clinical quality, then financially incentivise employers and employees to choose better-rated doctors. Went from a $1.35B valuation in February to $2.74B now. So to be clear, in the time they created $1.4bn in value, I haven’t even cleared my notifications.

🗂️ Novellia raises $18M to let patients own and sell their own health data to pharma: This has been coming and I think it’s a great direction for patient data ownership… New York-based Novellia has raised an $18m Series A for a platform that lets patients aggregate up to 20 years of medical records across multiple providers and choose to share anonymised data with pharmaceutical companies for research. Currently, brokers build research datasets from insurance claims and hospital records without any patient involvement or payment, so people are making bank on your info, which has always seemed unfair. This changes that. Top-10 pharma companies are already customers. Can enough patients be motivated to share to get to critical mass? Will pharma pay enough for consented data versus scraped data? Interesting.

🔒 HSSIB warns NHS trusts are managing digital safety risks from ePMA systems largely alone: ePMA software (the electronic systems hospitals use to prescribe and administer drugs) is meant to reduce medication errors, and a lot of the time it does. But everyone’s favourite branch, The Healthcare Safety Investigation Response Branch, has published a report saying there are no core national safety standards for how these systems are designed or procured, which leaves wide variation between trusts and real confusion about whether it's the CQC or the MHRA who's supposed to be watching. The good news is the report names the gap clearly and lays out exactly how to close it, and with the single patient record on its way, there's never been a better moment to build this in from the ground up.

Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

This week’s edition looks at two separate ultrasound AI companies that I recently had on The Healthtech Podcast. The founders are from completely different backgrounds, but both companies have great traction, great tech, regulatory approval and could each be generationally important.

For investors, founders and buyers, this one has everything about the ultrasound AI market that you need to know.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week I sat down with Dr Tom Chambers, anaesthetist and Co-founder and CMO of Theta Sleep, to unpack why 9.2 million people in the UK are living with undiagnosed sleep apnoea, why CPAP has an image problem, and how shifting diagnosis and treatment into the home could fix a supply-and-demand crisis the NHS isn't built to solve.

With NHS Online now formally established, this documentary-style episode from Digital Health's Tammy Lovell and Jordan Sollof is essential context. Starts with a 70-something widow in the Midlands who feels locked out of an increasingly digital system. Required listening before getting too enthusiastic about NHS Online.

Russ Branzell, CEO of CHIME, and Anupama Ambe of Kyndryl on how health systems are actually approaching modernisation right now: AI adoption, hybrid cloud, cyber resilience, and the operational pressures that make all of it harder than the brochure suggests. Ambe brings 25 years of transformation experience and is usefully blunt about what works.

Resources 📚

🧭 Curious about a move into healthtech?: For any clinicians weighing up a career in healthtech, Dr Yath Prem has written a whopping 105 pages covering how the ecosystem works, translating clinical experience into business language, CVs, interviews, salary and equity, and 50 UK companies to follow. And he walked the walk… (FY2 to senior clinical product role in under four years). Pigeon readers get 25% off with the code SOMX.

Events 📅

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit) and 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of 65 senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation, and risk in one room, no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The Forum that follows across 25–26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🏛️ Group Chief Digital Officer, Barts Health NHS Trust (London). One of the largest NHS trusts in the country wants its most senior digital leader… five hospitals, a major ICS role across North East London, and accountability for EPR, cyber, data and the full technology portfolio. If you want to run digital transformation at NHS scale rather than advise on it from the outside, this is the job.

🧬 Clinician Scientist, Pangaea Data (London / San Francisco, hybrid). Imperial-rooted AI startup, backed by Lord David Prior and former Novartis CIO, building clinical reasoning tools that find undiagnosed and undertreated patients at the point of care. A genuine clinical brain role working directly with clinicians and pharma clients on AI that actually reaches patients.

💙 Clinical Product Manager, Healthtech-1 (London). The team automating GP practice admin (new patient registrations, lab report processing, the mundane work that consumes 35% of NHS staff time) want a clinical PM to help build the parts of the patient journey that come next.

🔬 Medical Device Quality Engineer, Scarlet (London). Scarlet is the AI medical device certification company trying to make regulatory approval fast enough to not strangle innovation. If you know your way around ISO 13485 and EU MDR and the idea of auditing the most ambitious medical AI companies in the world sounds interesting rather than terrifying, they want to hear from you.

💬 Implementation Manager, Primary Care, Accurx (London, with practice travel). Accurx is in 98% of GP practices and the Implementation Manager role is the thing that makes adoption actually stick: onboarding new users, building relationships across practices, and feeding what you learn back into the product. For anyone with a primary care or NHS operations background who wants to see the NHS work better in a way they can directly point to.

📣 Want something in front of our 7,500+ readers?

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Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Thanks for reading Healthtech Pigeon 🐦! If you like what you see and you’ve not already, go ahead and subscribe 👉

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

I recently recorded two podcasts (a few weeks apart) with founders of ultrasound AI companies, both driven by personal stories and really tough lived experiences.

They were also both convinced that the obstetric ultrasound, the grainy black-and-white image nearly every pregnant woman in the country lies down for, holds far more than we currently pull out of it. One of them has spent thirty-five years inside paediatric medicine and the other had never read an ultrasound in his life.

Yet they arrived at the same fundamental belief from opposite ends of the earth, and that convergence is fascinating. Each could see something the other structurally couldn’t and the field is much richer for having both of them leaning over the same image, asking very different, very valid questions.

I’ve written this one around the idea that insiders often say to outsiders with a bold vision… “If it were possible, we’d already be doing it.” That might be the most expensive sentence in medicine, I’ve heard it a lot in my career, and I want to work out what it protects, and what it costs.

Read more

Hi friends, big week for ‘roided up superhumans at the Enhanced Games in Vegas, Apple’s the next company that now wants data from your wrist, but hey, good news - a couple of startups actually raised money 💰

News Bites 🥪

🏛️ The NHS Modernisation Bill = NHS England is on its way out: Another restructure. Excellent. Before he sacked himself, Wes put in a bill that kicked off with abolishing NHS England and folding it back into DHSC, then greenlit the long-promised Single Patient Record and abolished Healthwatch (FYI, whose tagline is “we make sure NHS and social care decision-makers hear your voice and use your feedback to improve care”). I mention it because the 2nd reading is tomorrow (Monday 1 June). If you enjoy watching as your NHSE contract gets lit on fire, or want to be the first to run the transcript through Claude to get a Linkedin post on it for those life-changing likes from strangers, go to parliament.tv at 3pm.

🏃 The Enhanced Games are real, and they’re equal parts entertaining and concerning: Weird one, this. Chatted about it on this week’s Pigeon podcast with Dr Tomasz George, who has a PhD in longevity. Athletes openly using performance-enhancing drugs, compete, and it’s broadcast as entertainment. The cynical might call it a modern colosseum as 2026 ‘gladiators' fight their own insecurities to death. The credulous might draw a line from athletes’ learning whilst optimising human performance.* A pre-event University of Birmingham study found 91% of competitors had used testosterone, 79% HGH, 62% stimulants, which isn’t exactly bleeding edge longevity science, but they are enhancements. Look, it’s adjacent to healthtech (longevity bros, biohacking, “performance optimisation” all share the same Venn diagram), and it’s a stress-test for what “consumer health” looks like when you remove the safety guardrails (kind of), but only 1 world record’s been broken at the time of writing so far, though, which is a bit disappointing / embarrassing.** Then again, do we really want someone jacked up so hard they break the sound barrier just to see how many years that took off their life?

🤖 1 in 7 Brits would rather ask ChatGPT than see a GP: The traction on this narrative keeps building. It deserves attention and we should take it to heart and build a system with it in mind. This time, a KCL/Focaldata poll of 2,083 adults found 15% have used an AI chatbot in place of a GP visit and 21% have decided against seeing a clinician based on chatbot advice. Lead author Prof Graham Lord isn’t celebrating. Remember, this is a poll, not a peer-reviewed paper, and we like our academic integrity here at Pigeon, so caveats do apply. But the direction of travel is obvious in that patients are already triaging themselves with LLMs, while the regulatory and clinical-safety frameworks are still on chapter one of the user manual. The NHS App’s AI features can’t ship fast enough.

👂 TympaHealth grabs £2m to keep peering into ears: Fellow Mauritian, Dr Krishan Ramdoo’s hearing-health platform has secured a £2m Innovate UK loan to scale Tympa Assist, the AI otoscopy tool used across the world. I first met Krish a long time ago, and even since then it’s been clear that Tympa is one of the genuinely useful “tech-enabled task-shifting” stories, moving ear care out of overstretched ENT clinics and into pharmacies and primary care. Frankly, I have a soft spot for those fixing a workflow problem rather than promising to reinvent medicine via API. Worth watching whether Innovate UK loans (vs equity) become a more common funding route for clinically-validated UK healthtech. We’re in dire need of a model between ‘spend your own money’ and ‘here, take this briefcase, but make sure you become the biggest company on earth or else 🫵🏼.’***

🩸 The $20m preventative health app setting a new European standard: Paris-based, Lucis, has raised a $20m Series A (led by Singular, with General Catalyst and Y-Combinator along for the ride), just four months after an $8m seed. They look at 110+ of your blood biomarkers, have an AI companion app, built in physician oversight, and claim a mission to make prevention "the default, rather than a privilege." The early data’s interesting, 99.9% of users had at least one biomarker outside optimal ranges, and 75% of six-month returners improved at least three markers without medication. At £399/yr, realistically, we have a long way to go before prevention is for the unprivileged (see part 1 and part 2 of my prevention deep dive for Pigeon Insider). But, with the likes of Lucis, Neko and others competing in this area, tech will advance, prices should come down and access should go up. The tipping point will be longitudinal data pointing to economic payback for one of these services at national scale, then real questions start emerging…

🩻 NHS SBS launches a £900m AI procurement framework: Not the Special Boat Service unfortunately (the NHS would be infinitely cooler, and you’d probably assume infinitely more effective, with an armed special forces unit persuading people to increase their tech adoption), alas, no, this is the Shared Business Services. Anyway, the new Healthcare AI Solutions framework is the biggest single AI procurement vehicle the NHS has put on the table. Critics say the structure and supplier qualification thresholds favour incumbents over the startups (try to look surprised). Good thing? Bad thing? Either way, if you’re a clinical AI vendor with UK ambitions, take a read.

And finally…

🍎 Apple Watch might be about to get a proper FDA-cleared BP feature: Given big tech’s obsession with getting our bodily data, it’s no surprise that Apple are reportedly submitting a direct BP measurement capability for FDA review, with the Watch Ultra 4 the leading candidate. I worked in ITU, so my bar for BP accuracy is pretty high and I’ve seen plenty of startups trying this for years (the validation papers are very mixed). But if Apple actually clears the FDA bar on cuffless BP at scale, you might say that’s a meaningful shift in the home-monitoring landscape and it might be a problem for every standalone BP device company. Distribution is most of the game these days in that weird grey area of B2C health/wellness/wearables/longevity stuff. Would be a win for patients in the community though, where accurate, more continuous BP readings provide insights that genuinely keep them healthier.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Pigeon Insider is the long-form upgrade to this lovely newsletter. It’s your way of supporting this one whilst getting some superb (if we do say so) deep research, analysis and views.

The latest edition has everything you need to know about clinically safe and valid mental health AI - the history, the technical architecture, what happens when it goes wrong and, actually, why my thoughts around them were completely wrong.

It was released on Thursday. The back catalogue is available once you sign up.

If you want to sound smart at your next board meeting, investor committee or family gathering… subscribe below. You’ll make the fee back via your inevitable, immediate promotion and pay rise.

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What to listen to 🔊

This week I'm joined by Dr Sujitha Selvarajah, co-founder of Hesta Health, who closed a £2M pre-seed round to rebuild postnatal care from the ground up. We get into why most of the women's health gap has nothing to do with reproductive health, why new mothers are abandoned at the moment their care needs spike, and what it actually takes to build healthcare that's both clinically excellent and humane.

Host Jordan Sollof is joined by Alcidion's UK MD/CMO Paul Deffley and CCIO Tracy McClelland to dig into patient flow and why it's the unglamorous bit of NHS operations that quietly determines whether everything else works. They walk through a live example fand unpack the key findings of the Public Policy Projects report on bed management and flow.

Clinical AI only helps patients if clinicians and health systems trust it. Seth Hain, Epic's Senior VP of R&D, makes the case for building foundation models that respect institutional autonomy, minimise burden, and prioritise safety.

Events 📅

🌆 SXSW London 2026
📅 1–6 June 2026
🇬🇧 London
Music, film, tech, culture, and a notably healthier health-tech track than the Austin original tends to feature.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street
London Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk together.

🌍 Global Ambitions Forum: ABHI International at Hale House
📅 3 June, 12:00-17:00
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
ABHI’s Middle East and US Accelerator alumni in one room with the wider UK health innovation ecosystem: Suzie Ali-Hassan, Stephen Williams (Intersurgical), Nick De-Pennington (Ufonia), David Porter (Apposite Capital). If you’re thinking about international expansion and want practical operating guidance rather than another panel about “global ambition,” this is the one.

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans🕵️‍♀️

🧬 Clinical Director, Metabolic Health, Ōura (hybrid, London). The $11bn smart ring people want an endocrinology/metabolic-medicine clinician with SaMD experience to own the medical strategy as they push deeper into chronic disease. Genuinely rare role: clinical depth plus consumer hardware reach.

🧠 Senior Product Manager, Limbic (London). Limbic now reaches 15%+ of NHS talking-therapies providers, and they’re hiring a PM to own the next phase of the clinical assistant. If you want to ship product into the NHS at actual scale, this is one of the few places doing it.

🩺 Clinical Lead (GP), Accurx (London). Pigeon has lost count of how many GP practices use Accurx. They’re after a practising GP to keep the clinical thinking close to the product. Two days a week clinical, three days shaping the tool you probably already use.

💻 Senior Software Engineer (Frontend), Neko Health (London). Daniel Ek’s preventative scanning empire is hiring across the engineering org as they scale their London and Manchester clinics. React/TypeScript stack, doctor-facing and member-facing apps. If your LinkedIn feed has been increasingly Neko-shaped lately, this is why.

🧪 Multiple roles, Lindus Health (London Bridge). The “anti-CRO” raised a $55m Series B and is hiring across commercial, clinical operations, product and engineering. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at how clinical trials are run and thought “surely this can be better,” they agree.

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** Even that was down to the banned-at-regular-events-swimming-suit which gives you an extreme hydrodynamic edge.

*** Not the best description of venture capital, but you get the point

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

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00:00 - Intro
05:08 - The Enhanced Games are real, and they’re equal parts entertaining and concerning

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hi friends, guess what? The Government has worked out that it can dodge "financial ruin" by hiring 380,000 fewer NHS staff and letting AI mop up the difference. Nice. Also, there's a blood test for Alzheimer's, a vaginal-health AI built on actual useful data, and a perinatal mental health pilot quietly demolishing NHS recovery benchmarks for the women the system usually fails. It’s all happening.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Pigeon Insider is the long-form upgrade to this lovely newsletter. It’s your way of supporting this one whilst getting some superb (if we do say so) deep research, analysis and views.

This week’s is a deep dive into companies using AI in mental healthcare. Where the evidence actually is, what’s genuinely working in digital mental health, what the optimal tech stack looks like, where the AI hype is getting ahead of the regulation, and the questions clinicians and commissioners should be asking before any of this gets near a patient.

I was released on Thursday. The back catalogue is available once you sign up.

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News Bites 🥪

🤖 The NHS plans to replace 380,000 staff with AI. Doctors aren't thrilled: Doesn’t sound great, does it. This draft NHS workforce strategy (out next month) reportedly bins the 2023 plan to grow the workforce from 1.4m to 2.3m by the mid-2030s, on the grounds that the increase would "bankrupt the NHS and the country." The fix, I hear you ask? Well, 380,000 fewer staff than previously forecast, a 75% cut to the planned nursing expansion, and AI doing thing. The BMA's Dr Amit Kochhar called it "crushingly disappointing" and a "massive, dangerous gamble." Much less polite words are also available online. Betting your entire workforce strategy on flawlessly deployed AI, is, at the best of times, pretty ****ing optimistic, but when we know the NHS struggles to deploy an EPR reliably, massive argument to label this delusional at best and dangerous at worst.

💸 The NHS also just opened a £900m AI tab. A GP called it "free money for mega corporations": Funny timing that. The same week we hear of plans to cut the workforce, NHS Shared Business Services launches a £900m "Healthcare AI Solutions" framework, which is a national procurement route for AI diagnostics, predictive analytics, robotics and consultancy. GP, clinical safety officer and software engineer, Marcus Baw, calls it "free money for mega corporations at a time when medicine is rapidly becoming an economically unviable occupation," adding that NHS England are "out of control with their spending." Get off the fence, Marcus. The flip side is that it could spark an amazing startup ecosystem if spent properly.

💊 DeepMind's drug-discovery spin-out bags another $2.1bn: Isomorphic Labs, the AlphaFold-adjacent love child of DeepMind, has closed a $2.1bn (yep, that’s billion) Series B led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, CapitalG, Temasek, MGX and the UK Sovereign AI Fund all piling in. That's on top of the $600m they raised barely a year ago, so somebody clearly likes what they're seeing. The cash will scale up their IsoDDE drug design engine and push their internal pipeline towards the clinic. Existing partnerships with Novartis, J&J and Lilly are providing the pharma muscle. The pitch, broadly, is that they've cracked a "repeatable way to design new medicines," which is either the most exciting sentence in biotech right now, or the sort of thing you say when you've raised $2.7bn and haven't yet put a molecule into a human.

🧠 Roche gets the green light for a blood test that spots Alzheimer's early: The catchily named ‘Elecsys pTau217’ cleverly detects amyloid pathology associated with Alzheimer's via a simple blood test. The point being made loudly by Roche is that it’s a tool for both primary and secondary care, not just memory clinics, which is interesting because getting an Alzheimer's diagnosis right now means a long, miserable trek through specialist appointments, PET scans, and lumbar punctures. A rule-in/rule-out blood test triaged at GP level could meaningfully shorten that journey, which matters more than ever now that we have actual disease-modifying treatments to offer the people who turn out positive. The caveat is that indeterminate results still need follow-up and the FDA nod is still pending. Let’s call it a win though.

🧫 Evvy launches an AI vaginal-health advisor trained on 100,000+ microbiome tests: It’s called EvvyAI and it’s a conversational advisor trained on what it claims is the world’s largest vaginal microbiome dataset (over 100,000 tests) to give women personalised guidance on vaginal health, fertility and menopause, handing off to its human care team when a question needs a clinician. And this in in a world where leading AI models reportedly flunk around 60% of women’s health questions because they were trained on data under-representing women. Less “we slapped GPT on a symptom checker,” more “general models are demonstrably bad at female biology, so we built one on female-specific data.” Excellent.

🤰 A perinatal mental health pilot for Black and minoritised mums is smashing NHS recovery benchmarks: We’ve spoken about the statistics and the gaps a lot here in the last few weeks, so it’s a pleasure to now report something positive. A digital perinatal mental health pilot from Dr-Julian and The Essential Baby Company (a model called haPPIE SHE Cares) has delivered results that put national averages to shame. 90% completed therapy and 74% recovered (NHS benchmark around 52%). It was built around community trust, culturally aware support, and, where possible, matching women with therapists who shared their background or language. With Black and ethnically minoritised women historically lacking trust in these services, Pigeon would very much like to see this get the funding to scale so more women get the help they need, and deserve.

👩‍⚕️ Nurses are being left out of the AI conversation, says Elsevier: Anddd, back to the AI drama. Elsevier's Clinician of the Future 2026 report (2,757 clinicians across 118 countries) found 41% of nurses feel underrepresented both in AI use and in the organisational decisions about AI, even as 61% of clinicians say they're seeing more patients. File this one right next to the lead story. We're planning to lean on AI to do more with fewer staff, while the largest part of that workforce says nobody's asking them how, when or whether the AI should be deployed. You cannot automate your way out of a workforce crisis while ignoring the workforce, people!

A BRAND NEW newsletter - for clinicians, by clinicians 📚

Clinicians, are you looking for somewhere to shoot the shift? Yep, thought so, because working in clinical practice is a ‘unique’ experience and those that get it, get it. Introducing Shift Happens, the monthly newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians. Free, no fluff, plenty of memes and smattering of lessons that fellow clinicians have learned along the way. The second edition is a collab with You Okay, Doc, a mental health charity dedicated to supporting healthcare professionals, so expect an excellent blend of poignant and punny. You know what to do 👇

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What to listen to 🔊

This week, I’m joined by Ranjan Singh who built HealthHero. It's now Europe's largest digital clinic, covering 35 million patients across four countries. He talks me through his acquisition-led playbook, and what an AI-first health system actually looks like when you're operating at this level. Given this week's "fewer staff, more AI" headlines, it's a useful look at someone doing the AI-at-scale thing in practice.

Over on Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch sits down with Dr Catherine Skellern, Dr Nancy Cibotti and Dean Mills on what AI documentation tools like Heidi actually do to daily clinical workflows.

Roswitha Verwer and Dr Muskaan Bhan of YON E Health on their device for measuring vaginal pH and basal body temperature at home, and what an under-served corner of women's health looks like when you actually build for it. The personal stories behind the product are worth the 40 minutes alone.

Regular listeners to The Healthtech Pigeon Podcast have had a running commentary on the status of both Jessica and Belle’s smear tests. Pleased to report one is complete and another is booked, and if you’ve been putting yours off, let the latest episode of Living Hellth from Jo Doyle, with Professor Adeola Olaitan, a gynaecological oncology surgeon with over 20 years of experience in the diagnosis and surgical treatment of cervical cancer, be another reminder to get it done STAT 🙏

Events 📅

🎤 OPUS x SomX: HealthTech Unfiltered
📅 Tuesday 26th May, 6pm
🇬🇧 OPUS House, London (55 Southwark St, London SE1 1RU)
SomX is teaming up with OPUS (the entrepreneur community) for an evening of two panels and zero corporate waffle. First the investors and operators on what’s actually getting funded and how to escape NHS pilot purgatory, then the founders building with AI, navigating regulation, and making impact land as a commercial argument. Patchwork co-founder Dr Jing Ouyang, Shamik and Katie Baker (Tandem) is the first panellist announcement. Food, drinks, and the top floor afterwards. I’m hosting. Come and say hi.

🌆 SXSW London 2026
📅 1–6 June 2026
🇬🇧 London
Music, film, tech, culture, and a notably healthier health-tech track than the Austin original tends to feature.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street
London Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk together.

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Group Chief Medical Information Officer at University Hospitals of Leicester & Northamptonshire: Given this week’s “AI will save us” energy, here’s the role that actually decides whether digital lands safely. The GCMIO is the most senior clinical leader across a multi-trust NHS Group, accountable for digital clinical safety, governance, and leading EPR design, procurement and optimisation. They want a credible senior NHS clinician with full GMC registration who can lead digital transformation at scale, positioning clinicians as co-designers of digital change, not passive users. If you’ve ever muttered, “This would work if a clinician were in the room when they bought it” this is that room.

✍🏼 Clinical Engineer at Anima: Anima's hunting for a medic who can genuinely code. You'd use your medical training to solve novel technical problems on their personalised-medicine platform: owning projects end to end, working across TS/JS with React, Node and Angular. Sounds like the role for you? Apply today

🫁 Clinical Research Scientist at TidalSense : TidalSense wants a clinician with strong research and scientific-writing skills to drive clinical evidence generation and regulatory support for its AI-driven respiratory diagnostics as it scales from startup to global.

📣 Want something in front of our 7,500+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

Break your news

Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Thanks for reading Healthtech Pigeon 🐦! If you like what you see and you’ve not already, go ahead and subscribe 👉

Subscribe now

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQjiGl53i8dtZ8g3xer2

📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

A note before we start. This piece deals directly with suicide, self-harm and severe mental illness, including details from a specific case involving a young person’s death. If that’s difficult territory for you right now, please look after yourself and come back to this another time. If you’re struggling, the Samaritans are on 116 123.

And, for transparency, I have no commercial conflicts to declare on this one. None of the companies named (Limbic, ieso, Ranvier) are SomX clients or compete with any of our clients, and nobody has paid for, sponsored, or seen this publication before. The companies appear because their founders came on my podcast and the work is genuinely fascinating and a frontier in healthtech that I want to talk about.

Half of NHS Talking Therapies patients don’t recover. That’s a strange thing to say without urgency, isn’t it? But we do.

At the last count, 50.2% of patients who completed a course of talking therapy came out of the other side recovered (which, by the way, was the target). Now there’s a new target of 53% by 2028–29, which the system is proud of working toward, and would mean… let’s just say it out loud… that a national achievement three years from now will be that 47% of mental health patients still don’t get better.

It’s hard to imagine any other clinical specialty setting that target. It’s actually impossible to imagine that. Why are we ok with mental healthcare not being effective for half the population?

And why doesn’t it work? Do we know who needs what, whether the therapy they got was any good, whether they actually got better? And what’s happening now, [trigger warning] when 1.2 million people a week are expressing suicidal ideation to ChatGPT (that would’ve read as hyperbole a year ago, and which is, in fact, OpenAI’s own published number)?

What looks to be finally forcing a change is technology, which the sector (myself included) spent the last couple of years being most afraid of. Not because AI will be scaled up to deliver therapy (that’s a different argument/discussion and I’ll come to that later) but because for the first time in the history of the specialism, the conversation generates a record, the record generates data, and the data makes the guesswork visible.

Historically, mental health has involved a fair amount of… well… guesswork. That’s hard to actually say out loud and, by the way, I’m used to an industry that uses sensationalist language for fun (and commercial gain), so I don’t take joy in ever doing that. But hear me out and I’ll try to explain.

A Likert scale in a stressed waiting room

The standard way to diagnose depression in UK primary care, in 2026, is to ask the patient to score nine statements between 0 and 3 on a form they fill out in a waiting room, often having just disclosed to a GP for the first time that they’re struggling. That’s called a PHQ-9. It broadly determines whether they get talking therapy, antidepressants, both, or neither, and which kind.

Now, indulge me, imagine the cardiology version. “We’re going to ask you nine questions about your chest, and then decide between an angioplasty and a triple bypass.” Yes, it’s not a direct comparison, but you get my point. Putting a subjective layer of patient reporting between the biological signal and the diagnostic input is far from ideal. That’s actually many layers of input and output influenced by the physical and metaphysical.

Ben Finley, who I had on my podcast recently (came up via Medtronic, drug development, and Publicis, now an advisor to Ranvier, a biotech company looking at new biomarkers for mental health conditions) put it pretty directly:

Now, skilled clinicians and patient-advocates may argue that the patient reported signal is the signal and that the subjectivity and subsequent answers are actually to be interpreted. In part, I agree, and I fondly remember my liaison psychiatry job really honing those history taking and interpretation skills to find the real signal. I also remember a pain consultant who once said to me “if a patient communicates pain, they are in pain,” which stuck with me in medicine and in life. But at the same time, I don’t think Ben’s wrong either. Objective biomarker measurements plus patient reported symptoms is, frankly, a much better data set to inform diagnosis and track recovery.

But we’ve never had those biomarkers. There’s no biomarker to depression like troponin is to an MI. The patient’s own self-report on appetite, sleep, mood scores and others are, historically, all we’ve had.

The good news is that this is all changing in two places at once. The earlier-stage version is the work coming out of David Nutt’s lab on serotonin taste sensitivity as a surrogate biomarker, now being commercialised by Ranvier. You did, indeed, read that right, they’re creating an actual taste test for mood (you taste less-well in a depressed state). Whether that specific product makes it through trials or not, let’s agree that the direction is interesting and exciting, i.e. towards objective, measurable, biochemical correlates of mental state. It looks like we’ll get there in the next decade.

How is technology helping?

For context, let’s take a typical NHS Talking Therapies diagnosis. The patient has waited weeks for a phone assessment. The phone rings on a Wednesday afternoon. The clinician (overstretched) has fifteen questions to get through. The patient, who hasn’t said any of this out loud before, has to organise their whole life into the right slots in the right order before the clinician can decide which pathway they belong on. About half the time, they end up on the wrong one. Three sessions later, the new therapist works out the diagnosis was wrong and they get moved.

Now picture the newer version (with technology that’s been deployed across 45% of NHS Talking Therapies services). The patient self-refers at 2am on a Tuesday, when they’re actually willing to talk about it. They have an hour, not ten minutes, and they’re talking to a system that has read the entire clinical literature on the differential diagnoses they might be presenting with. A clinical reasoning layer behind the chatbot (crucially, not the chatbot itself, which matters, and I’ll come back to) predicts the right pathway. Published in Nature Medicine on 129,400 patients across 28 NHS services, the downstream pathway changes drop by 45%. And diagnostic reliability across depression, PTSD and generalised anxiety hits 93%. See references at the end.

NICE looked at this last year, cautiously. Much of the evidence base is company-produced. There’s an open question about what happens to people triaged out of services entirely. Both fair, both resolvable. The point is that mental health diagnosis has stopped being a thing only a human can do and started being a thing a machine can do reliably enough to be class-2A regulated.

It’s important to note here that I’m on record saying that “AI should never be placed at the point of human suffering, alone.” That position was based on a romanticised version of what I’d want healthcare to be. I’m a clinician at heart, my bias toward humans is obvious, but don’t we all want a human to care for us? Well, maybe, but that position turned out to be indefensible against the backdrop of people getting no support at all. I was oddly stubborn for a tech evangelist, but hey, I learned new information and changed my mind. I’d be interested in your views once you’ve learned what a clinical reasoning layer is too (coming shortly in this piece).

The therapy nobody watched

The second guesswork problem might be the most structurally awkward of the four, and I’m not sure I’ve fully worked out where I sit on it.

Read more

What a week to be a wrist. Whoop is sticking board-certified doctors into its app while Google’s stripping Fitbit down to a £99 sensor with no screen, no subscription, and no opinions of its own. PCOS finally gets a name that reflects what it actually is, and the NHS Innovation Minister resigned mid-rollout while Palantir was being handed the keys to all our lovely identifiable patient data. Also Wes sacked himself. Quiet one.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Pigeon Insider is the long-form upgrade to this lovely newsletter. It’s your way of supporting this one whilst getting some superb (if we do say so) deep research, analysis and views.

This week, I’m looking into companies using AI in mental health. AI therapy bots are either the answer to a broken access problem or a safety scandal waiting to happen.

I’m digging into where the evidence actually is, what’s genuinely working in digital mental health, what the optimal tech stack looks like, where the AI hype is getting ahead of the regulation, and the questions clinicians and commissioners should be asking before any of this gets near a patient.

Released on Thursday. Back catalogue available once you sign up. Subscribe below.

Subscribe now

News Bites 🥪

⌚ Whoop hires a doctor (sort of): 24 hours after Google unveiled the £99, screen-less, subscription-less Fitbit Air, Whoop went the other way and announced clinicians inside the app via live video, syncing EHRs and adding “Proactive Check-Ins” that nudge you to sleep more before a big presentation. I’ve heard this modern AI age described as a ‘barbell’ where you get the super techy stuff on one side, then equally, more human things on the other. Businesses on one side making AI that structures AI for AI, while others monetise just going for a walk with a human. This is another one. Commodity hardware on one side, premium hardware-plus-human on the other. Who will win? Capitalism, so anyone but us probably.

🪪 Palantir gets “unlimited access” to identifiable NHS patient data: Here we go. The FT and the Guardian broke a leaked memo that all but confirms NHS England has granted Palantir staff access to identifiable patient data on the Federated Data Platform before it’s been pseudonymised. Fun. It also flags a “risk of loss of public confidence”, the procurement equivalent of saying ‘the Titanic might encounter some ice.’ Palantir’s defence is that it’s a “data processor not a data controller” and contractors can only see data, not remove it. A comforting distinction if you’ve never met the concept of a screenshot. The £330m FDP contract was sold in 2023 on the promise of pseudonymised data flows. This is not that. FFS.

🚪 The NHS just lost its Health Secretary and its Innovation Minister in the same week: Quite the fortnight for healthtech stability. First, Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary, declaring he'd "lost confidence" in Starmer and two days later confirming he'll run to replace him. He's been swapped for James Murray, formerly of the Treasury. Then Dr Zubir Ahmed, an actual NHS surgeon turned Health Innovation and Safety Minister, walked too, citing a "lack of values-driven leadership." Ahmed was the one running the NHS Online Hospital rollout, valproate and pelvic mesh redress, and life sciences reform, and, notably, the one who'd said this week that the Palantir NHS contract could be "reconsidered" if another firm could "do the job better." He's replaced by Preet Kaur Gill, Britain's first female Sikh MP.

🧠 Limbic publishes peer-reviewed evidence its AI improves NHS clinician wellbeing: Some good AI news. In fact, a rare AI-with-evidence moment. Limbic, the chatbot used by around 15% of NHS Talking Therapies, has published a study in Frontiers in Digital Health showing clinicians using their pre-assessment AI see statistically significant improvements in wellbeing and task performance, plus reduced cognitive load. N=131 across 9 NHS services. Caveats flags up front - Limbic-funded, Limbic-authored, observational, self-reported, and the cohort is 90%+ early-career PWPs. BUT, this is peer-reviewed in a named journal with a meaningful NHS sample, which puts it ahead of the 200-patient, single-site preprints that dominate the AI-in-healthcare press cycle.

♀️ PCOS is now PMOS: 14 years, 56 organisations, one Lancet paper: The condition formerly known as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome has been officially renamed Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS) in a Lancet paper published yesterday, after a 14-year global consensus process led by Monash’s Professor Helena Teede, Verity (PCOS UK), the Endocrine Society and 53 others. PCOS affects 1 in 8 women globally. The old name was coined a century ago when surgeons spotted what looked like cysts, and it’s been actively misleading ever since. The “cysts” aren’t cysts. It’s metabolic and endocrine more than gynaecological… and on a backdrop that women have been routinely under-diagnosed because they didn’t present with the morphology the name pointed at, this is long overdue. For context, that’s one hundred years of women being told they don’t have the thing they have, because of one bad noun. Names matter. The PMOS reframe should, over time, open the metabolic and cardiometabolic research funding that the old framing actively suppressed. This taking until 2026 tells you everything you need to know about how women’s health research gets prioritised.

🌷 Rotterdam’s Ditto raises €7.6m to translate doctor-speak into plain English: Heal Capital have lead a €7.6m round into Ditto, which is a free patient app that records (or ingests photos of) your medical consultation and turns it into a plain-language summary, translated into English, Turkish or Arabic if needed. Privacy-by-design, nothing stored centrally, EU infrastructure only, no training on user data. 100k downloads since launch last summer, Menzis (a major Dutch insurer) is recommending it to all policyholders, expansion to UK, Germany and Spain next. Lucas from Heal put it well… “Hundreds of startups build AI that helps doctors document. Ditto builds the equivalent for patients.” We’re all patients. And in vulnerable moments, we all forget most of what’s said in a consultation. To be honest, in a post-AI world this feels less ‘nice-to-have’ and more ‘basic accessibility.’

What to listen to 🔊

Finally got to have Kish on the pod! Dr Kishan Rees, as he’s more formally known, is Senior Director for Global Video & Digital Content Strategy at Bayer (what a title), a Watford fan (wore a garish away shirt for the recording) and spoke expertly on why healthcare's communication problem is now its biggest patient-safety problem.

Here’s a new podcast for you. Hosted by Liam Cahill and Henry Stoneley, it's about the actual mechanics of the NHS. Ep 1 dropped this week with Sonia Patel, outgoing CTO of NHS England and incoming CTO for the Government, discussing national vs local NHS decision-making, AI sovereignty, how suppliers actually reach NHS CIOs, and a parting "consistency and courage" call to the next generation of NHS digital leaders.

Events 📅

🎤 OPUS x SomX: HealthTech Unfiltered
📅 Tuesday 26th May, 6pm
🇬🇧 OPUS House, London (55 Southwark St, London SE1 1RU)
SomX is teaming up with OPUS (the entrepreneur community) for an evening of two panels and zero corporate waffle. First the investors and operators on what’s actually getting funded and how to escape NHS pilot purgatory, then the founders building with AI, navigating regulation, and making impact land as a commercial argument. Patchwork co-founder Dr Jing Ouyang is the first panellist announcement. Food, drinks, and the top floor afterwards. I’m hosting. Come and say hi.

🌆 SXSW London 2026
📅 1–6 June 2026
🇬🇧 London
Music, film, tech, culture, and a notably healthier health-tech track than the Austin original tends to feature.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street
London Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk together.

🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.

🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.

🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans 🕵️‍♀️

✍🏼 Customer Success & Implementation Manager at Concentric Health: Concentric are dragging surgical consent out of the paper-and-clipboard era - already used by 15,000 clinicians weekly. You'd work with the Clinical Ops Lead, shepherding deployments from contract through go-live and beyond. £60k, remote, 80% FTE considered.

⌚ Senior Program Manager, SaMD at Whoop, Boston: With Whoop’s medical-grade pivot landing this week (see bite #1), they’re scaling regulated SaMD execution end-to-end, dev through FDA submission.

🌱 Supply Chain Manager at LOAM Science, Remote (North America): Dr Karan Rajan’s gut microbiome venture is hiring its first proper supply chain owner. Demand forecasting, inventory planning, contract manufacturer management, 3PL relationships, the lot. Reports to the COO, fully remote (must be North America-based). CPG/DTC background ideal, Excel chops mandatory.

🇫🇷 Doctolib is hiring 150 in London (multiple roles open): Following their £100m UK push and Medicus acquisition, Doctolib is opening a full R&D centre in London and hiring across product, engineering and clinical. If you wanted to be at the start of a major European healthtech putting boots on the ground in NHS primary care, this is the moment.

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

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First, Whoop hires its first in-app doctor and Google launches the Fitbit Air - signalling that consumer wearables and primary care are converging faster than anyone expected. They get into what happens when your health data lives across competing ecosystems, the case for portability standards, and a viral TikTok in which a Whoop user catches her boyfriend cheating via Strava kudos.

Then: the Palantir saga rumbles on. A leaked memo published by the FT and the Guardian confirms that contractors were granted access to identifiable patient data on the Federated Data Platform before pseudonymisation. James and Jess disagree - loudly - on how to read it.

Finally, Berlin-based Ditto raises €7.6M from Heal Capital to build the patient-side equivalent of an ambient AI scribe: record your appointment, get a plain-language summary, share it with the people who matter. Plus a kicker: Wes Streeting resigned as we were recording.

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

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What a week. France wants a slice of the British primary care pie, the NHS has left the building and maternity clinical standards are getting the makeover they desperately need.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Free Pigeon stays free. Insider is where I put the stuff I can’t publish to 8000 people - the off-the-record conversations, the bets I’d actually make, the things I hear outside recordings. If you’re building, investing, or operating in healthtech, this is the edge. This week was the second in a two parter on preventative health - who pays, who delivers, who benefits…

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News Bites 🥪

⌚ Fitbit is dead, long live Google Health: The race is hotting up and there are three things to clock here. Medical records are now flowing into the same apps as your step count. Google Health Coach is being bundled into AI Pro and Ultra, so anyone already paying for Gemini gets a 24/7 health advisor thrown in, which is a brutal pricing move against every standalone coaching app on the market. And the screen-less, subscription-less, $99 Fitbit Air is explicitly designed to feed the Coach the data it needs, so the hardware is now a sensor for the AI, not a product in itself. They’ve officially stopped pretending Fitbit is a wearable and started treating it as distribution. The pace of change in the consumer-wearable market is unreal.

🇫🇷 Doctolib bets £100m that it can crack NHS primary care: French AI and digital health giant, Doctolib, which plugs into 40,000 GPs across Europe, is pouring more than £100m into the UK, hiring 150 people, opening an R&D centre in London, and swallowing Medicus (clinical software system) in the process. The pitch is the usual AI-flavoured one of documentation support, workflow automation, admin assistance… i.e. claw back the hours GPs currently spend wrestling with screens. Whether EMIS and TPP feel the heat or just shrug and carry on is the more interesting question. A foreign challenger throwing nine figures at NHS primary care is a nice vote of confidence either way.

🔒 The NHS Just Pulled Down the Curtain on Its Own Code: This is an odd one. The NHS has ordered hundreds of their GitHub repos (public folders where developers store and share code) to flip from public to private because Anthropic's Mythos model can (allegedly) ingest codebases and find vulnerabilities that humans miss. Most of the repos in question are documentation, architecture diagrams, and the digital equivalent of clinic-rota spreadsheets (hardly the crown jewels), but the vibe has generally been that public services built with public money should ship code openly. Fair. Terence Eden, formerly of NHSX, gently pointed out that all this code was scraped for training years ago, so closing the gate now is a bit like locking the stable after the horse has joined an LLM 🐴.

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🤰 The NHS finally writes down what good maternity care looks like: A new national maternal care bundle is (finally) rolling out across every maternity service in England by March 2027. Five conditions account for 52% of maternal deaths - blood clots, cardiac disease, suicide, haemorrhage and pre-eclampsia. And this sets standards in those areas. Every pregnant woman gets an early VTE risk assessment (clots are now the leading cause of maternal mortality), routine perinatal mental health screening, and a tailored epilepsy plan if needed. Trust boards have to report progress and there’s escalation if they don't. The fact that it's taken until 2026 to standardise this (and that improvements in care may have made a difference to the outcome for 45% of women who died from 2021–2023) is incredibly disturbing.

🏥 Barts becomes the first NHS trust to let AI read patient complaints: Six months in and Barts has said that using Copilot to draft patient complaint responses has more than halved the time spent on letters, cut reopened cases "significantly" and got replies out faster. Is this AI taking over what should be a deeply human process? Actually, no, this has apparently meant more time actually talking to the families who complained. If you've ever read an NHS complaint response, you'll know they tend to read like they were written by a gaggle of lawyers afraid of their own shadow*, so a bit of AI-assisted drafting might, ironically, make them feel more human, but I encourage you to read this with the eye of faith as admin relief and appropriate AI experimentation. We don’t want unsafe/inappropriate use of AI, but we don’t want to demonise appropriate experimentation and learning either.

🤖 Doctronic raises $40m on a chatbot that renews your prescriptions: “The world’s most popular AI doctor” (their words, not mine) has closed a $40m Series B for their chatbot that talks to patients about symptoms before transferring them to a clinician via telehealth. They’ve already done a first-in-the-nation experiment renewing actual drug prescriptions through a chatbot. Sounds interesting. Now, there’s a version of this story where you cheer (access, scale, free at point of use), and a version where you raise an eyebrow about chatbots refilling controlled medication renewals at scale. If you’re in the latter camp, I bet you’ve never realised way too late that you only have one dose left of something you’ve been on for years and had to drive like you’re auditioning for GTA6 to get to someone that can sort it.

🤖 AI vs AI: the great American claims denial begins: Amperos Health has just bagged a $16M Series A to scale agentic AI that navigates payer portals, sits on hold with insurers, drafts the appeals, and resubmits the claims, which is the unloved admin grind that US revenue cycle teams (63% of which are reportedly understaffed) currently drown in. The company says it's already recovering $700m a year across 3,000 clinical locations but there’s $262 billion to solve, so investors are likely to be rubbing their hands in delight as they see that hockey stick graph taking shape. UK readers can enjoy a moment of smug NHS solidarity with this a largely US problem, but the underlying dynamic is, well… interesting. Insurers deploy algorithms to deny claims, providers deploy algorithms to overturn them, and somewhere in the middle clinicians are just trying to treat patients.

And finally…

🤖 The AI Doctor Will Actually See You Now. A Human Won’t: Brace yourselves. I stumbled across this story from May last year on Bloomberg (needs a free signup but highly recommend) and I’m sharing because I’ve ended up down a proper rabbit hole. A year ago, almost to the day, Shanghai-based Synyi AI announced it had opened what it claimed was the world's first clinic where an AI makes the diagnosis and writes the prescription, with a human doctor signing off afterwards without ever seeing the patient IRL(!?). There was a pilot apparently running in Saudi Arabia's Al-Ahsa region with Almoosa Health Group and a few dozen patients, and they reckoned the error rate during testing was under 0.3%(!?). When something seems too good to be true, it usually is…

I tried to triangulate / fact-check this and ended up with WAY more questions than answers. The Synyi website is currently "Under Construction" with a 2019 copyright in the footer. Their LinkedIn has 485 followers, no banner, no posts. Almoosa's own news page is empty. And there's been zero independent reporting in the year since this Bloomberg piece - every “world’s first” article you can find is just a rewrite of it. Very odd for a company claiming to be running a globally pioneering AI clinic.

So far, so suspect. Is it even a real story or real company!?

Well, yes. Synyi filed for a Hong Kong IPO on 30 September 2025 under the 18C specialist tech rules, with CSCI, CCB International and BOCOM International as joint sponsors, listing Tencent, IDG, Hongshan (the rebranded Sequoia China, who do list Synyi in their portfolio) and Granite Asia (the post-split Asia arm of GGV) as senior independent investors. So it’s a real company with audited financials and very strong backing, just without strong online presence.

But on the way to figuring that out, I did find Chinese-language coverage (translated via Chrome) of the same launch above, that put the error rate at "under 3%" NOT 0.3% - i.e. 10x what Bloomberg reported, which is a meaningfully less impressive number and a pretty significant mistake (if it is one) for a massive media platform to write of a company about to take on investors at IPO...

According to more translated Chinese coverage (also translated by Chrome) Synyi AI was allegedly down to about $6.7m of cash against $63m of current liabilities, which does make a hurried IPO make sense and PR, mistakenly talking about a lower error rate than what they had, rather fortunate for the company. Not so much for investors.

I only wanted to know more about the AI clinic! To be clear, all of this is alleged info from amateur Googling, translating and conclusion-forming.

What to listen to 🔊

Those who have subscribed and listened to the podcast for long enough will know I’m not a massive wearables guy. I thought I might be coming around, then I sat down with Tiril Elstad, founder and CEO of Endor Global to talk about why chronic stress may be our generation's biggest health risk - and why most wearables are making the problem worse. Cool, cool, cool.

What do investors look for? How do you sell into the NHS? Is now a bad time to raise? Answers are buried in 450+ episodes, nobody’s listening to 600 hours of audio to find them, so I (AI) made a thing. Type a question, get an answer in <10 seconds, with a link to exact episodes where the thing was talked about. Click any link and the episode opens to exactly when the guest said it in Spotify. It’s free. No signup or any of that nonsense. Just a search bar and results. Lmk what it gets right and wrong.

Ask The Healthtech Podcast

I mean the title says it all, probably one of my favourite topics to discuss and debate on. This episode of HSJ Health Check dives into the regulatory struggles in trying to keep up with this surge in demand for AI mental health support.

Events 📅

🎤 OPUS x SomX: HealthTech Unfiltered
📅 Tuesday 26th May, 6pm
🇬🇧 OPUS House, London (55 Southwark St, London SE1 1RU)
We (SomX) are teaming up with OPUS (the entrepreneur community) for an evening of two panels and zero corporate waffle. First the investors and operators on what's actually getting funded and how to escape NHS pilot purgatory, then the founders building with AI, navigating regulation, and making impact land as a commercial argument. Food, drinks, and the top floor afterwards. I’m hosting. Come and say hi.

📊 Digital Health Festival 2026:
📅 20–21 May 2026
🇦🇺 MCEC, Melbourne
APAC’s biggest digital health gathering - 5,000+ attendees, strong on government digital strategy and the My Health Record saga. Pigeon hears Australia is lovely in May.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit:
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street, London
Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling together NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk on what “transformation” actually means once the consultants leave the building.

📈 From Records to Results: Unlocking Healthcare Through Data:
📅 5 June 2026
🇬🇧 RSM, London
The RSM’s data-focused day - how trusts are turning EHR exhaust into actionable analytics, with case studies from teams who’ve actually shipped something. Practical rather than theoretical, which is rarer than it should be.

🇳🇱 HLTH Europe 2026:
📅 15–18 June 2026
🇳🇱 RAI Amsterdam
The big one. Pigeon will be Pigeoning, potential SomX satellite event TBC. If you’re only doing one European healthtech conference this year, make it this one.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Medical Operations - UK, Tandem Health: A clinical role for an FY1/FY2-level doctor to own NHS secondary care deployments end-to-end - that's onboarding new trusts, training clinicians, optimising prompts based on what's working in the room, and feeding insights back to engineering so the product actually improves.

🫆 Medical Science Liaison, Cyted Health: This is a role where you’ll be building real relationships with NHS GI consultants, having high-level clinical conversations on pathway redesign, , and being the clinical face Cyted puts in front of NHS decision-makers. If you can confidently talk pathway change with consultants, this is the role for you.

🩺 Senior Medical Officer at HeliosX, Germany: HeliosX, the group behind Dermatica, MedExpress and ZipHealth, is launching in Germany, and needs a senior clinician to lead it. You'll build the local clinician network, own clinical governance, and shape how the service actually fits German healthcare. A rare chance to be the clinical founder-figure of a telehealth business in an entire market.

James’ editor notes:

* Did you know that there is no official collective noun for lawyers, but a lot of fun forums where potential ones are discussed? Popular suggestions include an ‘eloquence’ of lawyers, an ‘argument’ of lawyers and a ‘dispute’ of lawyers. These forums also contain suggestions like a ‘moan’ of clients and a ‘conspiracy’ of politicians. No comment from me on those, of course.

📣 Want something in front of our 7,500+ readers?

You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...

Break your news

Feature a job, podcast, event

Sponsor Pigeon

We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

What did Neko actually say?

Boil it down and Hjalmar was essentially proposing a theory of change. It was less a product pitch and more a claim about how healthcare systems shift and why, justifying the model Neko has chosen.

The theory has three moves.

First, the Spotify analogy. When was the last time you downloaded a song? Spotify didn’t kill free piracy (remember Napster?) by lobbying for stronger IP enforcement, it gave people something way better than the free option. The argument, by extension, is that preventive healthcare won’t be saved by policy or commissioning reform. It’ll be saved by someone building a product people actually want to use (buy). I know… “but healthcare should be free in the UK…” Park that for now. We’ll come back to it.

Second, the climate-tech parallel. Hjalmar spent a decade in renewable energy (before Daniel Ek DM’d him and altered his course) where carbon taxes and ETS schemes (where polluters pay for polluting) changed things far less than when decent electric cars turned up that people genuinely wanted to drive. He’s now applying the same theory to prevention, which is… don’t rely on policy, create something even more convenient/delightful that it changes behaviour entirely.

Third, the corollary. If consumer pull is what works, then vertical integration is what makes consumer pull possible. If you don’t speak tech, that means you can’t deliver a £299 scan profitably unless you control the hardware, the AI, the clinic, the operations and the experience. Bolt your prevention service onto someone else’s stack and the economics collapse.

All three claims are testable. Two have arguments either way. One of them is right in a way the UK healthtech industry hasn’t fully reckoned with. And, for me, the most interesting thing about the event was a GP who reframed the entire question, which I’ll come to.

23 years of failing the same way

Let’s start with the strongest version of Hjalmar’s argument, because the UK evidence base is uncomfortably supportive. Also, was it Einstein that said the thing about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results…?

In 2002, the Treasury commissioned Derek Wanless to model the long-term funding needs of the NHS. It’s fascinating if you haven’t read it. Wanless concluded that the NHS would only survive in something like its current form if the population became “fully engaged” with prevention. He gave two other scenarios, “solid progress” and “slow uptake.” You can probably see where this is going.

In 2007, Wanless returned to assess progress and guess what? The prevention warning had been blatantly ignored. In 2014 the Five Year Forward View called for “a radical upgrade in prevention” and quoted Wanless verbatim: that warning has not been heeded and the NHS is on the hook for the consequences.

In 2024, Lord Darzi’s review made the same diagnosis, again.

In July 2025, Wes Streeting published the 10 Year Health Plan, with “sickness to prevention” as one of three official shifts explicitly noting that the NHS prevention budget had been cut by 28% in real terms over the past decade. The NHS Confederation’s own analysis of whether this latest attempt will succeed is titled, with admirable honesty, “Is the left shift mission impossible?”

Twenty-three years, four governments and five major reviews gave the same diagnosis EVERY time. Prevention spending has gone down, not up.

Now, this is the empirical bedrock of Neko’s argument, and it’s genuinely strong. They don’t have to prove that consumer-pull is the right answer. They only have to prove that supply-side, policy-led prevention has failed for so long, and so consistently, that the burden of proof has shifted onto people defending the orthodoxy.

What’s odd is that the 28% real-terms cut to the prevention budget happened during the same period that successive governments published increasingly passionate prevention strategies. Coincidence? Nope. It’s a basic reality that prevention spending is the easiest line to cut when the acute system is in crisis, and the acute system has been in continuous crisis for fifteen years.

Every Health Secretary has had to choose between A&E today and prevention in a decade. We run 5 year political cycles so of course every Health Secretary has chosen A&E. You wouldn’t want the next government benefiting from your tough decisions…

Against that backdrop, the consumer-pull thesis has earned a hearing. And Neko has earned the right to make it more than most, because they’ve been unusually transparent about their actual data:

• Year One report (2023, Stockholm): of 2,707 scans, 1% identified life-threatening conditions the patient was unaware of, 6.6% significant, 76% rebooked.

• Year Two report (2024, 4,362 scans): 6.4% important findings, 81.3% required no follow-up.

• The 2025 repeat-scan analysis showed measurable biomarker improvements between scan one and scan two for the 1,469 returning members, with the explicit caveat (their words, not mine) that this is “not a scientific study with a control group.”

They publish their false positives and they run their own follow-up clinics so the NHS doesn’t carry the burden of confirming what they’ve flagged. That’s important to bear in mind because a lot of us in the room had no idea this was the case. Where needed, Neko do follow up bloods, imaging etc. and package people, after all their investigations, back to the NHS, with a plan. The other important distinction is that this isn’t full body MRI, it’s diagnostics “for only what is actionable” with a focus on chronic disease. As someone put it, “this isn’t a load of un-evidenced tests and a ‘dump’ back on the GP.”

So, the picture so far… An undeniable 23-year failure of state-led prevention (is that too harsh?), a company that publishes more honestly than most of its peers, unit economics that don’t require a Babylon-style implosion (is that also too harsh?), and a theory of change that, viewed against the timeline, has earned a serious hearing.

That’s the foundation. The next bit is where the other arguments get scrutinised.

Where the picture is bigger than either side

Strip the analogies back and Neko’s argument is this… High-quality operational and technological innovation, delivered at a price point that does actually widen access, creates a proof-of-concept that drags the public sector forward. The product becomes the argument. Build the thing that works, and the system has to engage with what you’ve built. Are they right? Well…

Read more

What a week. OpenEvidence gone. Medtronic hacked. Heidi hardwared. Settle in, lots to get through - bumper edition with all sorts of useful links this week.

Q: 🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form?
A: Click this linky link to get the pod on Spotify. And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you like to look at the faces of people when they talk.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Free Pigeon stays free. Insider is where I put the stuff I can’t publish to 8000 people - the off-the-record conversations, the bets I’d actually make, the things I hear outside recordings. If you’re building, investing, or operating in healthtech, this is the edge.

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* This is the last week the offer runs. Get it today or else.

News Bites 🥪

🚪 OpenEvidence withdraws from the UK and EU, citing AI Act uncertainty: This a really important one because it’s kind of the opposite of what a lot of people wanted and it feels like things have gone backwards. A whopping 40% of US doctors use OpenEvidence and they’ve now pulled it from the UK and the EU because of ‘regulatory uncertainty.’ A tool that’s well-evidenced (NEJM and AMA partnerships), demonstrably useful and free at the point of clinician use, has decided the UK/EU compliance pathway is too murky to bother with. We’re now in the awkward position where well-resourced US clinical AI companies are choosing not to deploy here, not because we’re regulated, but because we’re regulated unclearly. Important difference.

🧬 ICR's PhenMap AI tells you who won't respond to NHS bowel cancer drug: Bevacizumab (an angiogenesis inhibitor, for those interested) finally made it onto the NHS for bowel cancer last December, BUT… most patients won't benefit from it and the side effects (high blood pressure, GI problems, blood clots) are no joke. Enter PhenMap, an AI tool from the ICR and RCSI Dublin that scores patients on how likely they are to benefit, plus a second AI flagging mortality risk. It’s early days (built on data from 117 patients so far), but the BRAF mutation signal it picked up is exactly the kind of thing ‘precision oncology’ has been promising for a while (decade at least). If it validates in larger cohorts, we could be sparing thousands of people unnecessary side effects and sparing the NHS cash that it spends elsewhere. Win-win, in theory.

🛡️ Brunel’s RADIANT CERSI is giving UK healthtech startups a clearer, faster route through regulation

Imagine cutting months off your regulatory timeline, sidestepping the most common SaMD and AIaMD pitfalls, and walking into Conformity assessment submission with the same playbook the experts use - for FREE. That’s the offer RADIANT CERSI (Centre of Excellence for Regulatory Science and Innovation) is quietly putting in front of UK digital health founders, and it’s one of the most useful things to happen to the ecosystem in a while.

If you were in any doubt about their credentials, the Brunel-led Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation is backed by £1M from Innovate UK, MRC, MHRA and the Office for Life Sciences and it brings together UCL, KCL, Imperial College NHS Trust, BMJ, Zinc and the Health Innovation Network South London.

They’ve already taken 65 companies through 9 expert-led workshops covering clinical evaluation, QMS, post-market surveillance and the full regulatory toolkit. The RADIANT CERSI programme developed to specifically create (genuinely) usable tools to help all of you lovely startups orient, upskill and implement regulatory laws, standards/guidance.

This is what we need. Rigorous, academically-grounded, SME-friendly, and aligned with the 10 Year Plan’s “analogue to digital” shift. The best bit? Resources from the first cohort are now open-access on the RADIANT site, so any founder building a SaMD or AIaMD product can benefit immediately. Worth a proper look. Your future regulatory affairs lead will thank you.

Keep an eye out for a follow-up RADIANT CERSI panel discussion at Hale House this summer - the exact date TBC. Pigeons will be first to know.

🇬🇧 Boehringer Ingelheim plants a £150m AI flag in King's Cross: After MSD walked away from its £1bn UK plans last September in a public sulk about the government's life sciences ambition, the sector's been quietly hoping someone would show up with good news. Enter Boehringer Ingelheim, opening a new AI and ML site in King's Cross as part of a £150m, 10-year R&D bet. The pitch sounds familiar… better understanding of patient journeys, faster identification of disease mechanisms, smarter drug discovery… and they're aiming for 50 AI experts in place by end of 2027. With the London Cancer Hub's $1bn Sutton expansion in February as well, the "London as global life sciences hub" line is starting to sound less like a slogan and more like a plan. Lord Vallance is, predictably, delighted.

🔓 Medtronic got hacked, but don't worry about your pacemaker: Can a pacemaker even get hacked? Anyway, Medtronic have confirmed an unauthorised party rummaged around in its corporate IT systems. The reassurances are coming thick and fast, as you’d expect. “Products unaffected, patient safety unaffected, manufacturing unaffected, hospital networks separate, financials unaffected.” Genuinely good news, if true. The alternative is a horror story. Still, "we don't expect a material impact" is the kind of line you write on day 1 of an investigation, not day 90, and they're still working out whose personal data went for a walk. One to watch. Especially if you have a pacemaker. No, wait, they’re fine, right?

🎙️ Heidi clips a microphone to your collar (and quietly ditches the cloud): A bit late to this one, but the more we've sat with it, the more interesting it gets. Remote is a 21g wearable mic that clips to your scrubs and, crucially, transcribes on the device itself. No phone propped between you and the patient, no audio streamed to the cloud mid-consult, 14 hours of battery, works without Wi-Fi. So for psych, sexual health and paeds clinicians who've refused to touch a cloud scribe, on-device transcription changes the vibe pretty significantly. It also lands neatly into NHS England's updated BYOD guidance and the recent priority notification on AI scribes.

💷 Calibre exits stealth with $3.3M to do “causal” preventive health: With our Neko event this week, prevention is on-the-brain so I’m not surprised to have spotted this round. Interesting, this is a freshly minted category called "Causal Health Navigation". Wtf does that mean, I hear you ask? Well, ‘causal AI’ plus a clinician-led model tells you why a health metric is moving, not just that it is, which is a more rigorous alternative to the 230m people a week apparently now asking ChatGPT for health advice. Founders are ex-N26, ex-Elvie, ex-Manual, so the consumer-scaling chops are real. Does "causal" means something genuinely different? Or is it the new "personalised" doing rhetorical heavy lifting until an outcome study lands?

📱 The NHS App Just Quietly Did the Thing Everyone's Been Asking For: Hospital patients in England can now see their appointments in the NHS App. Letters, dates, locations, the lot, all in one place, finally. It's the kind of update that, on paper, removes the daily admin pain of "did that letter come, or did the dog eat it?" NHS England reckons it'll save millions of paper letters a year and cut down on missed appointments. Which is all well and good, except last week's King's Fund report found the App isn't actually shifting patients' views on NHS admin one bit. Features are landing. Sentiment isn't. Worth us asking why.

What to listen to 🔊

This week I sat down with Dr Clare Palmer, Director of Evidence Generation at ieso, to dig into what genuinely safe, clinical AI for mental health actually looks like, and why purpose-built, safety-constrained architecture is a different planet from people venting into ChatGPT. And here’s something NEW and fun 👇

What do investors look for? How do you sell into the NHS? Is now a bad time to raise? Answers are buried in 450+ episodes, nobody’s listening to 600 hours of audio to find them, so I (AI) made a thing. Type a question, get an answer in <10 seconds, with a link to exact episodes where the thing was talked about. Click any link and the episode opens to exactly when the guest said it in Spotify. It’s free. No signup or any of that nonsense. Just a search bar and results. Lmk what it gets right and wrong.*

Ask The Healthtech Podcast

This is fantastic. The first in Tjasa’s new series on how real patients are quietly using AI to navigate their care (often) without telling their clinicians. Dale Atkinson, a former financial crime investigator with a terminal diagnosis, brings a heck of a forensic eye to medical literature. A genuinely important listen.

A techy one for you. Pete chats to Sean Walker, CTO of Alcidion, to dig into the architecture decisions behind clinical AI platforms - TGA certification, human-in-the-loop, and why “context engineering” is replacing prompt engineering. A grounded, builder’s-eye view of the trade-offs.

Events 📅

🎉 Quick mention before we get going… what a Tuesday night. We (SomX) and Neko Health packed Hale House for a closed-door debate on The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits? There was a fireside with Neko co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne and Global Medical Director Dr Nikita Kanani MBE, hosted by yours truly and the room was stacked with a mix of NHS leaders, government, academia, employer health teams, investors and media all in one space, asking difficult questions about prevention at scale that (let’s be honest) don't usually get aired in public.

Thanks to everyone who attended and made the atmosphere what it was. The next Pigeon Insider (the upgrade to free Pigeon) will be a deep dive on my thoughts and what founders, investors and the NHS should know. Last chance to get the offer 👇

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📊 Blind Data
📅 6 May 2026, 12:30pm
💻 Online
Great name. Coplug’s lunchtime panel on neighbourhood-level data and what’s missing from the NHS’s data plumbing. A useful counterweight to the “just put it in the App” school of thinking.

🌏 4th International Conference on Global Healthcare and Medicine:
📅 7–8 May 2026
🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur
A two-day, 25-track gathering covering everything from oncology to e-health, aimed at clinicians, researchers and policymakers from across the region. If you want a passport stamp with your CPD points, here’s your excuse.

📊 Digital Health Festival 2026:
📅 20–21 May 2026
🇦🇺 MCEC, Melbourne
APAC’s biggest digital health gathering - 5,000+ attendees, strong on government digital strategy and the My Health Record saga. Pigeon hears Australia is lovely in May.

🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit:
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street, London
Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling together NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk on what “transformation” actually means once the consultants leave the building.

📈 From Records to Results: Unlocking Healthcare Through Data:
📅 5 June 2026
🇬🇧 RSM, London
The RSM’s data-focused day - how trusts are turning EHR exhaust into actionable analytics, with case studies from teams who’ve actually shipped something. Practical rather than theoretical, which is rarer than it should be.

🇳🇱 HLTH Europe 2026:
📅 15–18 June 2026
🇳🇱 RAI Amsterdam
The big one. Pigeon will be Pigeoning, potential SomX satellite event TBC. If you’re only doing one European healthtech conference this year, make it this one.

Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.

Jobs for humans 🕵️‍♀️

🛡️ Clinical Associate, Assuric: Assuric is the London-based digital health compliance platform that’s become a go-to for healthtech startups trying to navigate DCB0129, DTAC and the rest of the alphabet soup. They’re hiring a Clinical Associate: a clinical brain to sit alongside their team of Clinical Safety Officers and help startups get through compliance without losing the will to live.

🐢 Full-Stack Engineer, TORTUS: TORTUS, first ambient AI to land DTAC compliance in the NHS, deployed at GOSH and across UK primary care, is hiring full-stack engineers to scale OSLER. UK clinical AI you can actually ship into the NHS at speed. If you want to build the kind of system that wouldn’t have to leave the country to operate, this is one of the most exciting teams to do it with.

🎙️ Clinical Associate - Growth, Heidi: On the back of this week’s Heidi Remote launch, Heidi is hiring a part-time Clinical Associate to sit at the intersection of clinical practice and GTM, and lending clinical credibility to commercial conversations. If you’re a UK-registered clinician who wants to keep the day job but get inside one of the fastest-scaling healthtech companies in the world, this is a properly clever way in.

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James’ editor notes:

* On the build, please forgive the SaaS name dropping as if I speak Silicon Valley Tech Bro fluently, but I’ll list it all out and hyperlink so you can look them up if interested… Also Claude basically told me to use all of these in this order, so you really can just start with a prompt that says you want to build X and be talked through it. So, Deepgram transcribed 600 hours of audio in an afternoon (I think you have to do this as a podcaster because that’s your basic data for whatever AI keeps evolving into - someone else will do it on your podcast if you don’t - they still might anyway tbh). Voyage embedded the transcripts. Postgres + pgvector handles the semantic search. Claude does the synthesis under a tight system prompt that encodes The Healthtech Podcast’s voice (no "leverage", no "ecosystem", no rule of three etc). Lovable did the frontend (leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s a start and it’s functional). Supabase Edge Functions glue it together. Re: costs… about $90 to transcribe everything, $0.005 per query. We're now firmly in the era where one person can ship production software in a weekend by orchestrating models, and I suspect that the businesses that will compound from this are the ones built on proprietary editorial IP. That's what the pod is, and this is a lot of what SomX is becoming.

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

What a week: The Palantir-NHS relationship has officially reached the "maybe we should see other people" stage, Wes Streeting said the words "the NHS gaslights women" out loud (Pigeon had to read that twice), and Cera has opened a lab to, and I quote, automate everything but the human. Feels like 2026 is finding its voice…

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… This week, James and Belle from SomX put the healthtech world to rights.

Click this linky link to get the pod on Spotify. And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you like to look at the faces of people when they talk.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Free Pigeon stays free. Insider is where I put the stuff I can’t publish to 8000 people - the off-the-record conversations, the bets I’d actually make, the things I hear outside recordings.

If you’re building, investing, or operating in healthtech, this is the edge.

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🔒 This week in Pigeon Insider: The ceiling the preventive health space is going to hit and why it’s not the ceiling anyone’s talking about. Not the price point. Not the NHS adoption timeline. Not the regulatory pathway. Something more structural than any of those. There’s a 40 year old public health concept called the “"inverse prevention law” that I’d never heard of, and that you should definitely know about if you want to convince an investor.

James

News Bites 🥪

🏛️ Palantir's NHS break clause is suddenly very much on the table: Last week Pigeon brought you Tom Bartlett's spirited defence of the FDP from inside the tent. This week the tent spectacularly caught fire. In a Westminster Hall debate on 16th April, Lib Dem MP Martin Wrigley went full Chuck Norris on the £330m Palantir contract (the system is "awful to use", the NHS owns no IP, it's a "permanent lock-in"). Junior minister Zubir Ahmed (a clinician, to be fair) conceded that the break clause next spring is genuinely being weighed. Wes Streeting was conspicuously absent from the debate. Look, the thesis of the FDP (joined-up data, better outcomes) remains sound, but the execution question was never whether Palantir could build the thing, it was whether a politically radioactive US defence contractor holding all the NHS's IP was a sustainable architecture. Sounds rhetorical. Isn’t.

🩺 The Women's Health Strategy arrived with a £1.5m FemTech fund and a very quotable Streeting line: Wes said the NHS "too often gaslights women,” a sentence Pigeon is still processing from a sitting Health Secretary. The strategy bundles a new National HealthTech Access Programme, a trial linking patient feedback directly to provider funding, a £1m menstrual education programme, a fresh UK–India FemTech R&I partnership, and a £1.5m FemTech challenge fund to accelerate NHS adoption of women's healthtech. We’re genuinely glad this exists, but the fund size is awkward. Take France's Femtech Île-de-France launched in June 2025 with an initial €5m and a €50m target. We've rocked up with £1.5m. Either we think women's health is a priority, or we think it's a "priority."

🤖 Cera launches "world-first" AI Lab for the care sector: Cera’s put an eight-figure bet into a dedicated AI lab drawing on its dataset of 300 billion anonymised patient health insights from 2.5 million home visits a month. Ben Maruthappu's framing is - to save human care, we must automate everything but the human - easily the best one-liner of the week. Falls Prediction AI, care coordinator agents, field supervisor agents are already in deployment. The social care crisis is the NHS crisis that absolutely nobody costs properly. A UK operator with real scale, real data, and a licensing plan to export the tools globally is what good looks like. Watching closely.

💰 Q1 2026 digital health funding hit $7.4bn, and the mega-rounds are eating everything: CB Insights’ State of Digital Health Q1’26 report dropped this week. TLDR - $7.4bn raised, up from $5.9bn in Q4’25, with 19 mega-rounds ($100M+). Median late-stage deal size doubled to $108m. Eight new unicorns minted (the highest single-quarter count in nearly four years). M&A up 47%. The numbers that actually stopped Pigeon mid-biscuit: only 2.4% of FDA-approved AI medical devices have randomised trial data supporting them, and fewer than 20% of enterprise healthcare datasets are AI-ready without significant prep. Capital is moving roughly ten times faster than the evidence. Unlikely to end well. If you’re wondering where all the seed stage buzz is, well, the ‘mega rounds’ accounted for 60% of all capital.

📱 The NHS App isn’t actually making patients feel more heard, says King’s Fund: New King’s Fund report found no statistically significant difference between NHS App users and non-users on how well the NHS communicates with them. In 2024, App users were more positive. That delta’s now collapsed. The 10 Year Health Plan positions the App as the future “front door” to the NHS, which is fine, except the tenant hasn’t moved in (yep, I’ve stretched that metaphor). NHSE’s response was essentially yes, we know, that’s why we’re investing more. Remember, folks… digitisation ≠ transformation. A digital front door into a broken corridor is still a broken corridor. I’m definitely not bringing strong metaphor game today.

🧠 brainjo raises €2m to put VR psychotherapy on prescription for kids with ADHD: The plan here is to get DiGA status (Germany’s prescribable-and-reimbursable digital health app framework) for a VR-based ADHD therapy for 8-13 year olds. They have a clinical study already running with around 100 children and they’re targeting market approval in 2028. I feel like it’s been a while since VR was all the rage, but it’s never really gone away and I’ve spoken to Ross O’Brien and Sarah Ticho recently on the Pigeon podcast about it if you’re interested. For brainjo, a proper clinical study and a strategic pharma partner should separate it from the pack.

And finally…

📊 Stanford and Harvard’s State of Clinical AI 2026 is the reality check the sector needs: Turns out, if you take the most-cited clinical AI studies from 2025 and ask: does any of this actually improve care once it leaves the lab? The answer (depressingly often) is “not yet measurable.” Here’s the actual report. The argument is that the speed of academic publishing now lags the speed of model deployment so greatly, we really should just be focusing on outcomes that matter in real-world care. The CB Insights funding report above shows capital pouring in while the evidence base is still struggling to keep up. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” And repeat.

A BRAND NEW newsletter - for clinicians, by clinicians 📚

Clinicians, are you looking for somewhere to shoot the shift? Yep, thought so, because working in clinical practice is a ‘unique’ experience and those that get it, get it. Introducing Shift Happens, the monthly newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians. Free, no fluff, plenty of memes and smattering of lessons that fellow clinicians have learned along the way. Read the first edition here. And subscribe there 👇

Shift Happens

The newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians.

What to listen to 🔊

Ahmed from the Health Foundation and I chat through survey data on what Britain actually thinks about AI in healthcare. It won’t surprise you that the people who stand to benefit most are the most sceptical.

AI-driven risk prediction, organ-specific aging clocks, GLP-1s, and the case for prevention over cure. Big prevention themes at the minute - listen to this after reading Pigeon Insider and you have yourself a fantastic evening.

What has to actually work for clinical AI to stick? The a16z team chat through workflow integration, value-based care, trial design. Keep the State of Clinical AI 2026 report from above in mind, and the CB Insights number that 2.4% of FDA-cleared AI devices have RCT data behind them. The money’s moving. The evidence isn’t.

Events 📅

The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits?
🗓️ 28th April
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
SomX and Neko Health are convening a closed-door, Chatham House Rule evening for senior leaders from the NHS, policy, government, investment, and the healthtech industry to grapple with the prevention agenda - who actually pays for it, who delivers it, and who benefits. Features a fireside between Neko’s Hjalmar Nilsonne and Dr Nikita Kanani MBE, hosted by yours truly (Dr James Somauroo). Not a product pitch, not a sales event - just the right people in the right room having the difficult conversation. Places are very limited (120 max) so make sure to apply ASAP.

Request event spot

📋 Hardian Health Tech Summit 2026:
📅 29 April 2026
🇬🇧 BMA House, London
The annual no-hype, high-substance day on getting regulatory-authorised healthtech to market, with speakers from MHRA, FDA, NICE and Notified Bodies. £50 including lunch and drinks. If you’re building anything that needs a CE mark or 510(k), this one pays for itself before the coffee break.

🏥 The NHS Strategy Summit 2026
📅 30th April 2026
🇬🇧 County Hall, Westminster, London
Senior NHS leaders, ICB executives and industry innovators converging on Westminster for a day of debate on AI, digital transformation, workforce and neighbourhood integration. Sir James Mackey headlines. If you want to know where NHS strategy is heading in 2026, this is the room.

🌏 4th International Conference on Global Healthcare and Medicine:
📅 7–8 May 2026
🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur
A two-day, 25-track gathering covering everything from oncology to e-health, aimed at clinicians, researchers and policymakers from across the region. If you want a passport stamp with your CPD points, here’s your excuse.

HLTH Europe 2026
🗓️ 15–18 June
🇳🇱 RAI Amsterdam
Europe’s #1 healthcare innovation event, 5,000+ leaders from 50+ countries, and SomX will be there in force. Pigeon will be Pigeoning, and there might be a SomX satellite event to announce soon.

Opportunities for startups 🕵️‍♀️

🏥 Social Impact Accelerator - BCG X: Calling all startups… BCG X is offering 8–12 weeks of free product-building support - engineers, designers, strategists, no equity - to founders and teams working on digital, AI, or analytics tools for frontline health workers. Two committed team members and a working concept is all you need. Apply.

💰 Up to £100k for MSK startups from Orthopaedic Research UK: The Ronald Furlong Fund is open again for 2026, and it's a rare beast. Cash for pre-seed/seed startups working on bone, joint and muscle wellbeing. AI and digital health, biomaterials, prosthetics, osteoarthritis, fracture care, paediatric MSK, the lot. Stage 1 is a five-minute Loom pitch (no written application, no polish required), a refreshingly humane way to open the door. Deadline's 22 May.

Jobs for humans 🕵️‍♀️

💻 Lead Frontend Engineer, Accurx: Accurx are used by 98% of GP practices in England and send over 200,000 messages between clinicians and patients every single day. React shop, TypeScript, Shoreditch office three days a week, salary £75-105k plus meaningful share options. If you’ve led a frontend function before and you’re itching to do it somewhere that moves the needle on NHS care at actual scale, this one’s for you.

🧭 Head of Product, Patchwork Health: Patchwork’s tech is used across 200+ healthcare organisations and 100,000+ clinicians, and has saved the NHS £180m+ in workforce costs. They’re looking for a senior product leader to own the next phase. London, hybrid, remote-first culture. (Bonus context: cofounder Dr Jing Ouyang was on last week’s Pigeon Podcast - so if you want a sense of the vision before you apply, start there, then move onto Jing’s very own podcast, Out Of Programme)

🤖 AI & HQ roles, Cera: Off the back of this week’s AI Lab launch, Cera are hiring across data science, engineering, clinical and operational roles. If the idea of building AI tools on top of 300 billion patient data points with distribution across two-thirds of NHS care regions sounds like the right size of problem. Rare UK healthtech role where scale isn’t aspirational.

🛡️ Patient Safety Manager, Neko Health: Neko’s preventive health scanner is one of the more serious new entrants in the UK consumer clinical space, and as the clinics scale across Europe and the UK, patient safety becomes the most important role nobody talks about. If you’ve got NHS or regulated-provider safety chops and you want to build safety-by-design into a fast-moving healthtech from the ground up, this is a good one.

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We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we’ll let you know. Everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

Stories:

Palantir's NHS break clause is suddenly very much on the table

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Clinicians, a free AI tool for physicians, NPs and pharmacists

The Women's Health Strategy arrived with a £1.5m FemTech fund and a very quotable Streeting line

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

You might know I had Hjalmar Nilsonne, the CEO of Neko Health on The Healthtech Podcast recently and ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what preventative healthcare vs longevity is, what’s public vs private sector responsibility, and what on earth the barriers are …

Read more

What a week: AI diagnosed a made-up disease AND signed a deal to discover real ones. Meanwhile, OpenAI quietly became a pharma company. Is anyone actually keeping up with all this?

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… This week, Jessica, James and Dr Jing Ouyang, cofounder of Patchwork Health put the healthtech world to rights.

Click this linky link to get the pod on Spotify. And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you like to look at the faces of people when they talk.

Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.

Free Pigeon stays free. Insider is where I put the stuff I can’t publish to 8000 people - the off-the-record conversations, the bets I’d actually make, the things I hear outside recordings.

If you’re building, investing, or operating in healthtech, this is the edge. And here’s a sweetener for this week only… (expires on Friday so get it while you remember).

Get 50% off for 1 year

This week, readers get the inside track on a big company collapse that’s quietly reshaping where healthtech value accrues (and where your opportunity is as a result), a NICE-approved treatment almost no clinician offers (and the commercial opening that creates) and exactly what founders and investors can do to capitalise…

James

News Bites 🥪

🤖 AI Confidently Told Patients They Had a Disease That Doesn’t Exist: This is wild. A researcher at Gothenburg University invented a skin condition called “bixonimania,” uploaded two spectacularly fake preprints - fictional author, fake uni and thanking Professor Sideshow Bob*, then watched as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity all duly informed patients it was real. Aaaand it gets worse… the fake papers were then cited in actual peer-reviewed literature and only retracted after Nature (professionally) asked ‘wtf are you playing at?’ The cherry on top… the papers contained lines like “this entire paper is made up.” What a time to be alive.

💊 OpenAI Is Now, Functionally, a Pharma Company: Novo Nordisk announced a partnership with OpenAI to run AI across drug discovery, manufacturing, supply chain, and commercial ops, with full integration targeted by end of 2026. Follows Eli Lilly’s deal with Insilico Medicine in March, and Sanofi, Moderna, and Thermo Fisher all having signed similar agreements. OpenAI’s now in your pocket via ChatGPT, you give it your hospital data via ChatGPT Health and it’s designing the drugs that end up in you. Humanoid robots as GPs and it’s the full (?dystopian) health journey monopoly.

⌚ WHOOP Just Got Medicare to Pay for Your Fitness Tracker (Sort Of): Looks like patients with Medicare (US federal health insurance programme for people aged 65+) are about to get continuous health monitoring, personalised insights and real-time coaching via a WHOOP device, with cost-sharing covered. No need to change physician, no change to Medicare coverage. Just a wristband and a lot of data. Their CEO, Will Ahmed said on LinkedIn: “Our affiliated healthcare provider, Whoop Physician Services, PC, has been selected for the CMS Innovation Center’s ACCESS program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to bring technology-enabled, longitudinal care to Medicare beneficiaries to prevent chronic disease.” But more importantly, Reddit said:

If you need that explained, head to the footnotes**.

🩺 The AI Genie Is Out in Primary Care - & We Might Be Ok With It: The Lancet Primary Care is telling us that 28% of GPs in the UK are already using AI tools in clinical practice, and the NHS’s decentralised, independent-contractor model means adoption is racing ahead of any coherent governance framework. Their point isn’t that this is necessarily bad (and I’m inclined to agree), it’s that primary care is already the most AI-adopted part of the NHS, regardless of the centre’s readiness. A stopped clock is right twice a day etc…

🏗️ The FDP insider has left the building - and he's got things to say: Tom Bartlett spent three and a half years leading the 150-engineer team building the NHS Federated Data Platform. Now he's out, and he's written the defence of the FDP that no one inside NHS England was allowed to. His thesis, simplified: the political noise around Palantir has become so detached from the technical reality that it's actively harming the NHS. He has receipts - NISTA-green rating, 123 Trusts live, 110,000 extra operations, £200k per Trust per year - and he's not wrong that the loudest critics often haven't logged into the thing. But his "we all use Microsoft despite Bill Gates' Epstein associations" line is doing a lot of work***, and worth pulling apart.

✂️ CRISPR Just Got Small Enough to Actually Go Where It’s Needed: Researchers at UT Austin have engineered a miniaturised CRISPR variant - Al3Cas12f RKK (catchy), which fits inside adeno-associated virus vectors (the best delivery system for in-body gene therapy). The constraint’s always been that the most effective CRISPR proteins are too large to deliver precisely inside the body, which sadly limits clinical use to cells modified outside it. This doesn’t solve everything, but it’s a pretty meaningful step towards making gene therapy a realistic option for conditions like ALS, atherosclerosis, and certain cancers because gene editing efficiency has now jumped from under 10% to over 80%(!) across tested targets.

🌸 Menopause Startup Realised It Was Actually an AI Company (and Hit $1bn): Midi Health’s CEO Joanna Strober set out to fix menopause care and ended up building a custom AI chatbot because the general-purpose ones were, frankly, useless on women’s health. The gap in training data was that stark. Midi treats 25,000 patients a week with insurance coverage for over 45 million women and has just crossed the $1bn valuation mark - they’re now expanding into cardiology, obesity, and longevity. The AI piece analyses patient records before the clinician joins the call, automates triage, and mines what is apparently one of the largest women’s health datasets in existence. Bravo.

And finally…

🧠 A Neuroscientist Thinks He Can Reprogram Chronic Pain (£): Prof Mick Thacker’s argument, in a Telegraph feature this week***, is that we’ve been treating chronic pain almost entirely wrong. We currently treat pain as a signal from damaged tissue - fix the tissue, fix the pain. Prof Mick’s case is that chronic pain is better understood as a learned prediction the brain keeps generating long after the original injury has healed, and that the nervous system can, in principle, be retrained out of it through graded exposure, education, and movement-based therapy rather than drugs or surgery. If he’s right, it reframes a huge chunk of MSK, pain clinics, and opioid use…

A BRAND NEW newsletter - for clinicians, by clinicians 📚

Clinicians, are you looking for somewhere to shoot the shift? Yep, thought so, because working in clinical practice is a ‘unique’ experience and those that get it, get it. Introducing Shift Happens, the monthly newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians. Free, no fluff, plenty of memes and smattering of lessons that fellow clinicians have learned along the way. Read the first edition here. And subscribe there 👇

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The newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians.

What to listen to 🔊

Worth a listen if you’re interested in any of AI, radiology, obstetrics, maternal/foetal medicine, neonates and even just the progression of medicine and tech. Robert Bunn, after multiple failed startups and personal tragedy, built Ultrasound AI which predicts delivery dates (including premature) from ultrasound alone. Skeptical? Listen for the PAIR study and their De Novo FDA clearance. We cover what the model found, how it works, and why Robert is committed to making it available to every woman on earth, regardless of ability to pay.

If the Bartlett blog above got you interested in the FDP debate, here's the ground-level view. Jordan Sollof spoke to Will Monaghan, Group CDIO at University Hospitals of Leicester - the first organisation to roll out the FDP at scale - about what it's actually delivered, how ambient AI from Accurx is changing the day job for clinicians, and why he thinks the platform isn't for everyone.

Events 📅

The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits?
🗓️ 28th April
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
SomX and Neko Health are convening a closed-door, Chatham House Rule evening for senior leaders from the NHS, policy, government, investment, and the healthtech industry to grapple with the prevention agenda - who actually pays for it, who delivers it, and who benefits. Features a fireside between Neko’s Hjalmar Nilsonne and Dr Nikita Kanani MBE, hosted by yours truly (Dr James Somauroo). Not a product pitch, not a sales event - just the right people in the right room having the difficult conversation. Places are very limited (120 max) so make sure to apply ASAP.

Request event spot

DMEA
📅 21–23 April
📍 Berlin
Europe’s dedicated digital health IT congress - DMEA connects the full breadth of the digital health industry, from clinical informatics to health data infrastructure. If you’re looking to understand what’s happening on the continent, this is the room to be in.

BioSolutions UK
📅 21 April, 8:45am–7:30pm
📍 Glaziers Hall, London
Where engineering, biology, and commercial ambition converge. BioSolutions is the BIA’s flagship event for the UK’s biotech and life sciences sector - strong on investor access and the kind of frank conversations about what it actually takes to scale that you don’t always get at the glossier conferences.

🩺 RSM: Wearables & Bio-sensors - Transforming Health Monitoring:
📅 23 April 2026
🇬🇧 Royal Society of Medicine, London
The Royal Society of Medicine’s Digital Health Section turns its attention to the bit of healthtech we’re all wearing on our wrists (or fingers, or anywhere else a sensor will fit). A half-day session on how wearables and bio-sensors are actually changing clinical care - not the consumer-gadget hype, but the bit where the data hits the EHR.

📋 Hardian Health Tech Summit 2026:
📅 29 April 2026
🇬🇧 BMA House, London
The annual no-hype, high-substance day on getting regulatory-authorised healthtech to market, with speakers from MHRA, FDA, NICE and Notified Bodies. £50 including lunch and drinks. If you’re building anything that needs a CE mark or 510(k), this one pays for itself before the coffee break.

🌏 4th International Conference on Global Healthcare and Medicine:
📅 7–8 May 2026
🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur
A two-day, 25-track gathering covering everything from oncology to e-health, aimed at clinicians, researchers and policymakers from across the region. If you want a passport stamp with your CPD points, here’s your excuse.

🔐 RSM: Cybersecurity and Clinical Risk Management in the Era of AI:
📅 13 May 2026
🇬🇧 Royal Society of Medicine, London
AI tools are being adopted across the NHS at a pace that makes the procurement teams sweat - and this RSM session looks at what that means for cyber risk and clinical safety. Early bird closes 30 March, so move quickly if you want it cheap.

🇦🇺 Digital Health Festival 2026:
📅 20–21 May 2026
🇦🇺 Melbourne
8,000+ attendees, 400+ speakers, 11 conference theatres and an After Dark Party - the southern hemisphere’s biggest digital health gathering, basically. If your roadmap includes APAC expansion, this is where you go to make it happen over a flat white.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Medical Operations - UK, Tandem Health: Tandem Health’s ambient scribe powers Accurx Scribe, which is being rolled out across 200,000-odd NHS clinicians. They want a recently-qualified clinician (FY1/FY2 types) to own deployments end-to-end across NHS secondary care - onboarding, training, prompt optimisation and feeding insights back to engineering. London-based, expect a lot of UK travel and the odd trip to Stockholm.

🫆 Medical Science Liaison, Cyted Health: Cyted’s EndoSign capsule sponge is the kind of thing that makes you wonder why we ever bothered with endoscopies in the first place. They need an MSL with 2–3+ years in clinical medicine or medical affairs, deep NHS GI/oncology relationships, and the gravitas to talk pathway redesign with consultants and commissioners. Remote with customer visits and trips to Cambridge.

💊 Clinical Service Manager (Specialist Teams), HeliosX: HeliosX hit £781m revenue last year. Anyway, this role line-manages three specialist teams - senior pharmacist prescribers, the side-effects nursing team, and the AVC doctors handling GLP-1 video consults - across the most clinically complex bits of the service. 3+ years managing clinical ops in digital health, hybrid in Central London.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏽

* IYKYK

** Brain worm guy = RFK Junior (NY Times) and see below for alleged obsequiousness. Don’t say we don’t give you references.

*** Classic ‘tu quoque’ - deflecting a criticism by pointing out the critic is guilty of something similar, rather than engaging with the criticism itself. The fact that we all grudgingly use Teams tells us nothing about whether Palantir should be running NHS data infrastructure; those are two separate questions, and conflating them lets the actual debate off the hook. There's also a deeper issue that I think Tom skates past: concentrated power means we have to use Microsoft. Choice isn't really on the table. My read is that the clinician backlash to the FDP is an attempt to demonstrate some ethical consistency in the one place they still have a voice, not evidence of hypocrisy. Tom's broader point about tech-vs-politics decoupling is genuinely worth all of us talking about though, and he's right that "what would you replace it with?" is the question that critics do keep ducking.

*** Small pigeon-preen: SomX placed this one, so, yes, SomX gets clients Telegraph coverage if you’re a PR client. Get in touch etc..

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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.

00:00 - Intro
09:10 - FDP: An Insider's Perspective
28:21 - WHOOP affiliate selected for CMS innovation program

Stories:

https://www.bartlettdata.co.uk/post/blog-coming-soon

https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/whoop-affiliate-selected-for-cms-innovation-program-to-expand-tech-enabled-care-for-medicare-patients

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