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.

Get 25% off for 1 year

🔒 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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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.

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 👇

Shift Happens

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..

📣 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.

This week: A waist-worn wearable designed for women launches in Lagos, a wrongful death lawsuit asks some very uncomfortable healthtech questions, AI psychosis is a new clinical pattern we need to understand, nobody knows who should own our data (the top two contenders are Palantir and the government, believe it or not), and you might be swapping your stethoscope for a POCUS probe.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… This week, Jessica, James and Hugh Harvey talk about everything ‘big tech regulation.’ And a lot about wearables too.

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.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Google updates Gemini’s mental health safeguards: A really sad case has thankfully led to some change. A wrongful death lawsuit was filed in March saying Gemini spent weeks manufacturing a delusional fantasy for a 36-year-old Florida man before framing his death as a “spiritual journey.” Google have responded with a redesigned one-touch crisis hotline interface, a “help is available” module developed with clinical experts, and $30 million over three years to global crisis hotlines. LLM-induced-psychosis is a relatively new, but very real clinical concern. It shouldn’t have required a lawsuit to unlock safeguards, but here we are. A great Substack read below on the topic by a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry for those interested.

Michael Halassa

LLM-Induced Psychosis: A New Clinical Pattern We Need to Understand

When I first encountered reports of people developing psychotic symptoms after extended conversations with large language models, I was skeptical, perhaps underlying vulnerabilities may emerge coincidentally alongside chatbot use. But over recent weeks, my perspective has shifted dramatically. Over the past weekend, I spoke to a colleague in New York wh…

Read more

10 months ago · 37 likes · 33 comments · Michael Halassa

⚖️ UK NHS staff are refusing to work on Palantir’s £330m data platform: A quiet rebellion is underway inside the UK NHS with staff refusing to engage with Palantir’s £330m Federated Data Platform because of their ties to US defence contracts and its CEO’s ‘political positions’ (Trump immigration cheerleading). As one senior NHS official put it: “People are saying, ‘I refuse to work on this software. You have to find something else for me to do.’” Worth noting the FDP is already live across many, many NHS trusts and it’s central to the 10-year plan’s data ambitions, so this is a right mess. Who knew… values matter to people in healthcare.

👗 Meet Bèbèdí: the waist-worn wearable built for women, launching in Lagos: Built for women, starting in Lagos, Bèbèdí tracks temperature, movement, posture, cycle patterns and sleep from the waist, which is both culturally grounded (waist beads have tracked the body for centuries in West African tradition) and clinically interesting (the waist is one of the first places the body signals change). The AI companion app builds your personal baseline from your own data rather than population averages and the AI companion app promises "no scores, no performance metrics, no optimisation" - just clarity about what your body's actually telling you.

🧠 Can AI generate psychiatric training cases? Kind of. [Study]: I’m willing to bet most med students with side hustles have had this idea - use LLMs to generate case vignettes and question banks. Turns out it is actually more complicated than “just ask ChatGPT.” This npj Digital Medicine paper had three board-certified psychiatrists rate ChatGPT-5 Pro’s ability to generate psychiatric vignettes involving patient chatbot use. Relevance and diagnostic sufficiency = high. Safety ratings = lower. That last bit matters because in mental health education, a vignette that gets it 90% right might teach the wrong 10% in exactly the wrong direction, so unfortunately for your unit economics, you are going to have to keep that human in the loop.

🔒 BMA calls for GPs to remain in control of single patient record data: The fight over who controls your medical data is heating up, and it’s not just about Palantir. NHS England thinks GPs controlling a multi-service, single patient record wouldn’t be “appropriate” and that all your GP notes, hospital records, and mental health data are best kept in the hands of the government. Hmm... GPs want to keep control of their bit, arguing they need to “act for the best interests of our patients” and “maintain confidentiality.” Is Pigeon missing something? How is this even a debate?

⚠️ When “virtual monitoring” isn’t enough: the tele-ICU lawsuit raising hard questions: A warning. Healthtech is only as good as the service it’s part of. Conor Hylton, a 26-year-old UConn dental student, died at Bridgeport Hospital in August 2024 after being admitted with pancreatitis and alcohol withdrawal. The lawsuit alleges no on-site doctor assessed him from ICU admission until after he experienced seizure-like activity and his care described as “sporadically monitored remotely on a TV screen.” The hospital says their tele-ICU model pairs virtual monitoring with bedside teams. The family’s lawyers call it a “fake ICU.” Tele-ICU is a legitimate, valuable model, but it requires rigorous design, clear escalation protocols and serious attention to human factors.

🫀 HeartFocus and Inteleos launch the first AI cardiac POCUS certification pathway: POCUS has been on a quiet innovation run for years. I remember (many moons ago) writing about the launch of Butterfly IQ and how they rewrote the hardware economics by swapping piezoelectric crystals for semiconductors (if you understood that sentence, you, too, did some really unnecessary medical exams), which unlocked a wave of downstream innovation in bedside imaging. Now you can actually get certified in AI-guided cardiac POCUS, so, in theory, perform diagnostic-quality heart scans at the bedside without needing a specialist cardiologist or rad in the room. Will an ultrasound probe around the neck be the new stethoscope?

It’s here. Pigeon Insider launches today.

Five years of writing this newsletter and there’s always been a version of it I couldn’t quite fit in - the one where I go down a rabbit hole of research, questioning everything, getting off the record takes from people and trying to find answers to how we actually make things better through healthtech.

That’s what Pigeon Insider is. Fortnightly. Longer. No headlines to hide behind.

Each edition will do one of three things: spot a signal early and explain why it matters, tell a founder or operator story with the detail that makes it actually useful, or take a clear position on something the industry is dancing around.

This version of Pigeon is going nowhere. Always free. Every week.

Insider is for people who want more than just the news summaries and want the analysis. Founders, investors, operators - if you read Pigeon because you want context, not just content, Insider is the next step.

Upgrade to Insider

In this week’s edition:

• An $8.9 billion corporate collapse, what it tells us about where healthtech value actually sits and how a new model unlocks it

• A NICE-approved treatment for a condition affecting millions that fewer than 0.5% of clinicians offer

• Why the government’s 10 Year Health Plan might - might - matter this time

• What I think this means if you’re investing, building, operating, clinically involved, or running NHS transformation

Hope it’s useful.

James

What to listen to 🔊

I sat down with Dr Yath Prem, Medical Advisor at Flo Health, to get into a very topical question in healthcare right now: why NHS doctors are leaving for healthtech, whether the content creators cheering them on are doing anyone any favours, and what "clinical product" actually means once you're in it.

In this one, host Tara gets into the 2026/27 GP contract, the uncapping of GP salaries within ARRS (which Finn thinks is the biggest risk to additional roles, and he's probably right), and why cutting appointment slots from 20 to 10 minutes looks good on a spreadsheet and absolutely nowhere else.

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, government, investment, and 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 soon.

RADIANT-CERSI Impact Showcase Event
📅 16th April
🇬🇧 Brunel University London
This showcase will bring together the partners, funders, academics, and industry partners who have been part of the work RADIANT are doing to make the regulation of digital health and AI products more navigable, evidence-based, and fit for the pace of innovation.

DMEA 2026
📅 21–23rd April
🇩🇪 Messe Berlin, Germany
Europe’s leading digital health event - around 900 exhibitors, 20,500+ visitors and 470 speakers across three days. If you’re building, selling or buying healthtech on the continent, this is where the conversations happen.

BioSolutions UK
📅 21st April
🇬🇧 Glaziers Hall, London
Engineering biology meets industry - covers the biotech you know and love as well as food, agriculture, chemicals, materials, environment and biofuels. Startups, scale-ups, investors and policymakers in one room. Good if you’re building at the intersection of biotech and the bioeconomy.

The Future of Medical Grade Wearables
📅 23rd April
🇬🇧 Royal Society of Medicine, London
Explore how wearable technologies and bio-sensors are transforming health monitoring, clinical care, and creating powerful tools that improve patient outcomes.

Mental Health Innovation: Choosing the ‘Right’ Capital
📅 24th April
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
A practical map of the funding routes genuinely available to mental health ventures in the UK right now: what different funders actually want, which route you’re realistically on, and how to make capital decisions that don’t compromise clinical quality or long-term sustainability.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🚀 Director of Growth, Voy (Do Health) – Mobile-first preventative health product inside Voy, co-founded by Dr Rangan Chatterjee. Own the full growth engine from scratch, zero to nine figures ARR. Rare latitude, high bar.

🤝 Medical Operations - UK, Tandem Health – Tandem’s AI clinical notes software is rolling out to 200,000+ NHS clinicians via Accurx. This role is the sharp end of that deployment. Clinical background essential.

📱 Product Manager (Social & UX focus), Doctify - Doctify connects patients with verified providers across 6 countries. This role owns the social and networking product roadmap. 5+ years in product required.

🏥 Chief Clinical Product Officer, Dyad - Senior exec role owning product direction end to end at an NHS-focused healthcare AI company. Medical qualification strongly preferred, lived NHS experience essential.

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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.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a founder that I haven’t been able to shake. Then I had another. Then another. Then I went looking at the data. And I think there’s a new model quietly taking shape in healthtech that almost nobody is talking about - but a hand…

Read more

If you’re in the UK, hope you had a fabulous long weekend. If you’re elsewhere in the world, this is coming to you on Monday because we all give ourselves Friday and Monday off and decide to spend most of it on the UK’s horrendous motorway network, promising ourselves “we’ll leave earlier next year.”

Anyway, a fun week in healthtech… WHOOP does a Series G (G!?), a diagnostic tampon wins a UK healthtech pitchfest, and Apple’s app store now requires declaration of medical device status 👌🏼

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… this week there isn’t one (see above motorway issues for a clue as to why) but you can absolutely click this linky link to get to the pod on Spotify and listen to the wonderful backlog of the SomX team talking about healthtech (and other) things. And if you’re a video>audio kinda person, here’s the SomX YouTube channel if you wanna see us. Go on. Treat yourself.

News Bites 🥪

🍎 Apple’s App Store will show if an app is classified as a regulated medical device: Fantastic news for patient safety and you’d hope this kicks off a real butterfly effect. If your app sits in Health & Fitness or Medical categories in the US, UK or EU, you now need to declare whether it’s a regulated medical device and that status will show up on your App Store product page. New apps must comply immediately and existing apps have (quite a while, annoyingly) until early 2027, after which Apple’s gonna flat out block you. If you are a regulated device, you’ll need to provide your FDA Owner/Operator Number or EU Manufacturer SRN, instructions for use, intended purpose statement and safety info - all public. Good for consumers who currently can’t tell a CE-marked diagnostic from a wellness app that tracks your mood with emojis. It’s maybe worth asking - does a platform label create a false sense of clinical validation? Apple says it confirms regulatory compliance, not efficacy, so you can see where criticism and gaming might come in, but we’re happy with the direction here.

💰 WHOOP raises $575M Series G at $10.1bn valuation: How high up the alphabet does it even go these days? They’re also throwing around names like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy who are now invested, but I’d pay more attention to Abbott and the Mayo Clinic appearing on the cap table. As the gap between the consumer and the healthcare system gets very blurry (and busy with hardware and software) the trend is wearables being taken more seriously as clinical infrastructure with the WHOOPs of the world aiming to become genuine health data platforms. Worth noting that WHOOP got an FDA warning letter last year over its Blood Pressure Insights feature and the FDA reversed course in January. Naughty over-claiming decacorn, you 🫵🏼

🩸 FemTech startup Daye announced as Rewired Pitchfest 2026 winner: Daye is the fantastic women’s health biotech behind the diagnostic tampon that doubles as an at-home tool for detecting high-risk HPV, the leading cause of cervical cancer. For winning, they get advisory support and the potential for an NHS pilot with CW+ - exactly the kind of route-to-adoption that most healthtech startups would chew their own arm off for. Fun fact… Pitchfest alumni include Limbic and Peppy, so the track record of winners going on to actually do things is strong.

🧬 Lucida Medical raises £8.7m for AI-powered prostate cancer diagnostic: The context here matters - there’s a 30% shortfall in clinical radiologists across the UK right now, expected to hit 40% by 2028, and only 55% of men in England were diagnosed before their cancer had spread in 2024. Lucida’s already deployed across 15 NHS hospitals, CE-marked and approved in the EU, and is now going after FDA clearance. There are an estimated 610,000 men living with prostate cancer in the UK (which is up 20% in five years) so this is exactly the type of AI-in-healthcare story that doesn’t need the hype. The bottleneck is real, the workforce gap is documented, and the clinical validation is happening inside the NHS. More of this.

🧪 Same-day UTI test tells doctors which antibiotic actually works [study]: This is novel. University of Reading researchers have built a method that skips culturing entirely… urine goes straight into a cartridge preloaded with antibiotics, optical imaging watches what grows and what doesn't, and you've got an answer in under six hours. In 352 patient samples, it matched standard lab methods in over 96% of cases, which matters because 1/4 NHS urine samples contain resistant bacteria and UTIs have caused over 800,000 hospital admissions in England in five years. Getting the right antibiotic first time isn't a convenience thing, it's a resistance thing. Spin-out Astratus Limited is taking it to market 👀…

🔒 Health data giant CareCloud says hackers accessed patients’ medical records: This is not ideal. The healthcare IT firm serving over 45,000 US providers confirmed that hackers accessed one of its six EHR environments for around 8 hours in mid-March. It’s not yet known what data was taken, or even if anything was exfiltrated, but the company filed the disclosure with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which suggests this is pretty serious. Did you know EHR data is some of the most valuable on the dark web? Yep. Fantastic criminal package of Social Security numbers, insurance data, diagnoses, and prescription histories. The investigation is ongoing… Take cyber security really ****ing seriously folks.

And finally...

🤖 Humanoid robot tested on a hospital ward. Totally normal: Remember the Milton Keynes penguin robots? Well, they've been upgraded. Sort of. The Unitree G1, a Chinese humanoid robot, is being tested in a hospital setting. If you click the headline, you’ll see a video of it opening drawers, restocking supplies and moving beds. As Bertalan Meskó points out, the Moravec paradox still applies (robots find hard things easy and easy things hard), but when workforce shortages are this acute, you start looking at solutions you'd have laughed at five years ago. UC San Diego researchers have already tested the G1 across seven medical procedures including ultrasound, intubation and auscultation via teleoperation. We're not quite at robot nurses. But we're not quite not at robot nurses either. Sleep well.

Something new is coming to Pigeon.

Next week, I’m launching Pigeon Insider - a fortnightly deep-dive that goes way beyond the headlines.

Every other week, subscribers to Insider will get a longer piece that:

• Breaks down a market signal before the rest of the industry catches on

• Unpacks a founder-operator story with the honesty that polished PR strips out

• Takes an editorial position on something I think matters and nobody’s saying

This isn’t another newsletter. It’s the bit of Pigeon I’ve been wanting to write for five years - the analysis, the pattern recognition, the “here’s what I’m actually thinking” that doesn’t fit into the weekly roundup.

If you’re a founder trying to read the market, an investor looking for signal over noise, or an operator who’s tired of surface-level healthtech commentary, Insider is built for you.

More details next week. For now, just know… Pigeon is about to get a lot more interesting.

James ✌🏼

What to listen to 🔊

Why is medicine 150 years behind in understanding the role of humans in healthcare? I sat down with Dr David Neal, Assistant Professor at Amsterdam UMC and co-lead of the eHealth Living & Learning Lab (ELLLA) to dive in, as well as chatting about what happens when technology disrupts a healing ritual that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 16th century. Some big questions answered in this one…

From a remarkably blunt public warning by NHS England's own tech committee chair about leadership voids and unmitigated cyber risk, to why EPR systems that cost £40m still have staff logging into seven different screens. Plus the AVT market, the NHS app's rebrand as your "lifelong digital companion," and why clunky systems are costing as much staff time as sick leave. Well worth a listen.

Events 📅

RADIANT-CERSI Impact Showcase Event
📅 16th April
🇬🇧Brunel University London
This showcase will bring together the partners, funders, academics, and industry partners who have been part of the work RADIANT are doing to make the regulation of digital health and AI products more navigable, evidence-based, and fit for the pace of innovation.

DMEA 2026
📅 21–23rd April
🇩🇪 Messe Berlin, Germany
Europe's leading digital health event - around 900 exhibitors, 20,500+ visitors and 470 speakers across three days. If you're building, selling or buying healthtech on the continent, this is where the conversations happen.

BioSolutions UK
📅 21st April
🇬🇧 Glaziers Hall, London
Engineering biology meets industry - covers the biotech you know and love as well as food, agriculture, chemicals, materials, environment and biofuels. Startups, scale-ups, investors and policymakers in one room. Good if you're building at the intersection of biotech and the bioeconomy.

The Future of Medical Grade Wearables
📅 23rd April
🇬🇧Royal Society of Medicine, London
Explore how wearable technologies and bio-sensors are transforming health monitoring, clinical care, and creating powerful tools that improve patient outcomes.

Hardian Health Tech Summit 2026
📅 29th April
🇬🇧BMA House, London
The annual Hardian Health Tech Summit is bigger than ever! Join leading voices from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, US Food and Drug Administration, NICE and industry innovators as they share real-world insights on getting regulatory-authorised healthtech to market.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🚀 Head of UK Customer Delivery, Lyrebird Health: A wise (spider)man once said “with great power comes great responsibility” and this role embodies the phrase perfectly - you’ll be in charge of customer delivery across the entire UK. The means building, leading and scaling the UK delivery engine from the ground up. Up for the challenge?

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant - Software Quality Assurance, Hardian Health: If you know your IEC 62304 from your ISO 14971, have a passion for quality assurance and cutting-edge medical device software, you absolutely want to apply for this role at Hardian Health, the go-to consultancy for getting AI and software medical devices through regulatory clearance.

📱Head of Product, Patchwork Health: If you think you have what it takes to translate Patchwork’s product vision for multiple products into reality and build the system that builds the products, apply today!

🖥️ Strategy Principle Consultant, Feebris: This is a customer-facing role, perfect for someone from a consulting or transformation background who wants to move closer to commercial outcomes and take ownership of seeing all that hard strategic work convert into real-world adoption.

📣 NIHR Survey: Why Aren’t More Medical Technologies Designed for Children: Only 0.5% of FDA-approved orthopaedic devices were designed for children, just 2% of approved AI radiology tools are labelled for paediatric use, and a meagre 5% of the UK’s national research budget goes to paediatrics. The NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Paediatrics and Child Health wants to understand why - and they need to hear from you (the industry). If you work in healthtech or medtech (even if your focus is entirely adult populations), this short survey asks what the real barriers are to building for children and young people. The data will directly inform how the gap gets addressed. Takes five minutes. Worth it.

James’ editor notes:

1. I’m pretty excited about launching Pigeon Insider next week. There’s so much we can do with Pigeon for the healthtech space, so fingers crossed it adds value and we can get a flywheel going.

2. I’ve covered off Jay Z (#280) and Eminem (today) so far in the Pigeon titles. DM me if you have other millennial rap inspiration 😂

3. If you want something in Pigeon, things get a lot of views and clicks - this is direct distribution to the healthtech space, so check out those links if you want to put things in.

📣 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 ✌🏼

This week: Another consumer health AI enters the chat (yawn), but a fire breathing copilot deployed into the NHS, $440 billion left on the table and the age-old dilemma, jam first or cream?

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… 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.

News Bites 🥪

🔍 Introducing Perplexity Health: Another week, another consumer health AI. In what’s become a standing agenda item for Healthtech Pigeon, we’re not really sure what else there is to say on this one, so we’re not going to labour it. Perplexity Health connects your Apple Health, wearables, medical records from over 1.7 million care providers, and lab results into a single interface etc., etc., etc. It’s the latest in a growing line of major AI platforms to launch a dedicated consumer health product in the last three months blah blah blah, following OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google/FitBit, Anthropic….. Stay tuned for the launch of Netflix Health next week.

🐲 From passive tools to agent factories: Manchester goes all-in on AI: Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) has launched Microsoft’s AVT (remember that acronym from last week?) Dragon Copilot, which isn’t controlled by a Targaryen Queen, doesn’t breathe fire, but does, apparently, cut some admin task time in half, which sounds promising. If you want more details on the nuts and bolts, Microsoft’s Jacob West was on The Healthtech Podcast* talking about a shift from passive AI tools to active, orchestrated agents. MFT are now living that vision at scale with thousands of Copilot licences and the ‘Agent Factory’ that lets hospital teams design and deploy custom AI things. The big question is obviously whether those capabilities extend to fixing printers and hospital parking.

🏥 Devon puts 1.3 million patients on a single EPR: By August, the OneDevon EPR programme will have all 1.3 million people across Devon on a single, horizontally-integrated instance of Epic. Anyone who has braved the trip across the rural county on a bank holiday weekend**, will appreciate the feat - a single login and no more systems that don’t talk to each other. Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, which led the charge, was also the first trust in the UK to integrate AVT directly into an EPR, and feeds more wearable data into Epic than any other site in Europe (teacher’s pet). According to Harris, the cultural shift has been huge, with staff now instinctively asking, “can we do this digitally?” The county that puts cream on first clearly has its priorities right.***

📋 Under 50% of NHS staff receive basic EPR training: If the last story got you thinking ‘alls good in EPR land,’ think again. A Health Foundation survey of 1,725 NHS staff found that only 46% using an EPR had received basic training, 64% said EPRs had added to their workload, and 53% said it’s made their work harder. Weird that that 75% still feel EPRs improve patient care... There’s clearly faith in EPRs but the execution might not be quite there. A recent report from the BMJ Future Health Commission also backs that up. We’re asking people to work on top of decade-old systems they were never properly shown how to use, while simultaneously planning to layer AI agents and ambient voice on top. Let’s maybe fix the basics first?

🫀 This AI stethoscope is catching heart disease that rural doctors are missing: This is cool. Eko Health’s AI-powered stethoscope is flagging two to four previously undiagnosed cardiac conditions per shift at Wayne General Hospital, where obesity, hypertension, and untreated diabetes run rampant and specialist cardiology is basically nonexistent. It picks up atrial fibrillation, murmurs, and low ejection fraction in under a minute by combining digital auscultation with real-time ECG, potentially shaving weeks off diagnosis time. The best bit is that it already slots into the existing clinical workflow, so no extra clicks, no “digital transformation” deck required, AND, because it has a reimbursement code, in theory, it pays for itself, which is music to this Pigeon’s ears****. Eko CEO Connor Landgraf was on The Healthtech Podcast back in 2021 if you want the origin story.

👩‍⚕️ From margin to mainstream: The future of women’s health: PwC have run the numbers on something we’ve been saying for a while. Women’s health is a $430–440 billion global market today, projected to hit $600 billion by 2030, and that’s probably an understatement because the projections are based on currently defined categories. The real opportunity is in the conditions that have been misdiagnosed, underfunded, or just not studied because male biology was the default. To be honest, it kind of sucks that it feels like we have to reduce women’s health to a commodity for it to get the attention it deserves, but I guess money talks. On that note, a little louder for the investors writing the cheques; your LPs (and the world) will thank you.

And finally...

🗞️Nature study: Your morning heart rate could predict your afternoon crash: New research from Mount Sinai, Yale, and Oxford published in npj Digital Medicine found that a 60-second smartphone heart rate check in the morning can predict whether long COVID and ME/CFS patients will experience a crash, fatigue flare, or brain fog later that day. They found that spikes in resting heart rate and drops in HRV were reliably followed by worsening symptoms, with prediction accuracy meaningfully beating symptom history alone. So it’s a refreshingly useful application of digital biomarkers and a tool that has the potential to help people with complex chronic illness plan their day around their biology. Actionable - that’s what we like. Bravo.

What to listen to 🔊

When James sat down with Declan Hadley, they covered everything from the evolution of healthcare technology and the importance of digitisation to the role of AI in improving patient outcomes, to lessons learned from raising a successful son in the world of Fantasy Premier League. I have many questions…(which would probably be answered by listening).

The relationship between the NHS and new technology is a tricky one to say the least. This chat between the ineffiable Annabelle and Liam delves into why so many innovations struggle to move from pilot to practice, and shares some practical insight into what it would really take for the NHS to become a better partner for healthtech (ehem, “NHS”, hope you’re taking notes).

Events 📅

Healthcare Conference 2026 – The Longevity Frontier
📅 30–31st March
🇬🇧 London Business School, London
LBS brings together healthcare leaders to discuss longevity and its impact on healthcare systems. Worth a look if you're thinking about what the ageing population actually means for the sector.

Challenges of Starting a Women’s Health Company: An Honest Conversation with Founders
📅 1st April
🇬🇧 London Business School, London
LBS brings together a panel of leaders in the women’s health space for candid discussion on fundraising, building in women’s health, and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Hardian Health Tech Summit 2026
📅 29th April
🇬🇧BMA House, London
The annual Hardian Health Tech Summit is bigger than ever! Join leading voices from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, US Food and Drug Administration, NICE and industry innovators as they share real-world insights on getting regulatory-authorised healthtech to market.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🐢Full-stack Engineer, TORTUS: TORTUS are building an AI co-pilot for physicians. They are clinician-founded, mission-driven, and one of the exciting early-stage teams in UK healthtech right now. They need a full-stack engineer to help scale OSLER, their clinical AI product. Get in early.

🧑‍💻 Senior Consultant - Software Quality Assurance, Hardian Health: If you know your IEC 62304 from your ISO 14971, have a passion for quality assurance and cutting-edge medical device software, you should probably want to apply for this role at Hardian Health, the go-to consultancy for getting AI and software medical devices through regulatory clearance!

🧪Clinical Project Lead, Lindus Health: Lindus are rebuilding clinical trials from the ground up, faster, smarter, and far less painful than the industry standard. They need someone to own end-to-end trial delivery across the full lifecycle, delivery, compliance, sponsors, budgets, the lot. Up for the challenge? You know what to do.

🔬Clinical Specialist, Google: A clinician role sitting inside Google Health, making sure AI gives people the right health information at global scale. Need we say more? Run don’t, don’t walk.

📣 NIHR Survey: Why Aren’t More Medical Technologies Designed for Children: Only 0.5% of FDA-approved orthopaedic devices were designed for children, just 2% of approved AI radiology tools are labelled for paediatric use, and a meagre 5% of the UK’s national research budget goes to paediatrics. The NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Paediatrics and Child Health wants to understand why - and they need to hear from you (the industry). If you work in healthtech or medtech (even if your focus is entirely adult populations), this short survey asks what the real barriers are to building for children and young people. The data will directly inform how the gap gets addressed. Takes five minutes. Worth it.

Jessica’s editor notes

* It’s almost as if The Healthtech Podcast is THE podcast to listen to for the best insights in healthtech, but what would I know 🤷‍♀️

** You know the one - hitting the A38 at Exeter and realising there is no more motorway until…ahhh. I grew up in Devon and it’s genuinely quicker to fly to Europe for the weekend. Sorry Mum and Dad.

*** There is only one right way to cream tea, because the cream is like butter, ok. Don’t come for me, Cornish subscribers.

**** Yes, I googled what Pigeon’s ears looked like - while they do not have external ear flaps (pinnae) like mammals do, they ham ve two specialised holes located behind and slightly below their eyes, which are hidden underneath protective, sound-permeable feathers called auriculars. These hidden ear canals are fully functional, enabling excellent hearing for navigation, finding food, and detecting predators. So now you know. [Source: Google AI 🙃]

📣 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 ✌🏼

This week: Google have slapped their health coach on the table and a clinical AI startup wants to wrap it up.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… 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.

News Bites 🥪

📊 8/10 doctors now use AI. They just don’t want their patients to: Rage-baiting you with that headline to make a point… I removed all the context and went for an emotional reaction… did it work? The survey is from the US and shows a big jump (38% to 81%) of clinicians using AI in their work. Before you panic, take a look at the graph below for what they’re doing with it. When you talk really broadly about ‘clinicians using AI,’ it’s incredibly easy for your mind to go straight to diagnosis and treatment. The reality is very different. Assistive diagnosis was just 17% and even that should be broken down into exact tasks before we cast judgement. Why? because here’s two prompts that may require Class II device certification, but have wildly different safety profiles:

• “Based on this history and examination, have I missed anything in this differential diagnosis” is very different to…

• “What treatment shall I give for a patient with leg pain and PR bleeding.”*

🧠 Forget making LLMs better at therapy. Wrap a clinical brain around them: Instead of expecting OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta to become compliant or better at therapy (one of the most common applications of LLMs since their inception), could we think of it a different way? Limbic just published a randomised, double-blind trial in Nature Medicine showing that their “Limbic Layer,” a clinical reasoning system trained in CBT, when wrapped around general-purpose LLMs like ChaGPT, Claude etc., produced therapy sessions rated superior to bare LLMs AND to human clinicians on standard CBT scoring metrics. There was also a ‘complimentary’ real-world analysis of nearly 9,000 users and those with highest exposure to the Limbic Layer had a 51.7% recovery rate versus 32.8% in the comparison group. The question is what now…**

💷 £7.4bn for NHS digital. Now someone just needs to spend it well: This is the number the healthtech market has been waiting to see. DHSC and NHSE’s internal plan commits £7.4bn to technology, digital and data through to 2030. It won’t directly unblock the commercial dry spell, but if it’s spent well and fast, the procurement pipeline should follow. Big if. Also, to be absolutely clear, this is internal planning guidance, not a spending announcement, so don’t go refreshing the tender portals just yet.

🤰 Nadia Care raises $12M to bring maternal care back to the community: They’re expanding a community-based maternal health model across the US. And get this, tech fans… Their approach is deliberately low-tech in places - care actually delivered at home, virtually, and yes, Walmart car parks. The round was led by Valtruis and a national payer, which suggests someone believes the unit economics work. The maternal mortality crisis, especially for Black women, is one of the clearest failures of the healthcare system, so you can’t ignore results like this… 60% drop in NICU days, 47% reduction in low birth weight, and 38% fewer preterm births across roughly 4,000 members since 2021. Deserves more than $12M.

🫀 CT-like chest imaging at the bedside sans radiation: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s the type of phrase that motivated engineers at the University of Hong Kong to prove you wrong and develop SonoMeta***, which, granted, isn’t CT, it’s AI powered ultrasound (cool name though - Metalens), but it uses metamaterials that can visualise cardiac structures up to 10cm behind the rib cage - that’s approaching CT quality and get this… Zero radiation. And at the patient’s bedside. It’s currently in multi-centre clinical trials in Shanghai and Hong Kong and the obvious application: emergency settings, ambulances, anywhere you’ve ever thought - “if only we had a CT and we could do X.” Commercially very compelling if the trial data holds up.

🧬 Roche builds pharma’s biggest AI factory: Roche has gone full send on AI infrastructure, announcing a massive expansion that brings its total on-premises GPU count to over 3,500 NVIDIA Blackwell chips - the largest announced GPU footprint of any pharmaceutical company. Here we go… some fun stats… At around $30–40k per GPU, we’re talking somewhere in the region of $125m on chips. Also, at (allegedly****) 84% gross margins on each chip, Jensen Huang is the real winner. The Roche vs NVIDIA partnership stretches back to 2023, and Roche says the “AI factory” powers its Lab-in-the-Loop approach, where AI models and wet-lab experiments feed into each other at scale.

🧠 Blood test spots brain tumours with 90% accuracy - works like a Covid test: UK scientists coming up clutch this time at the University of Manchester - they’ve identified a pair of blood proteins that can detect glioblastoma with 90% accuracy. It’s in clinical trials across six UK sites and four internationally, and the team wants to expand it to cover other brain tumour types too. Exactly the kind of diagnostics innovation we need more of. The “within a decade” timeline is promising and optimistic. But if it works, genuinely transformative.

And finally...

🏋️ Google wants Fitbit to know your medical history. Sure, why not?: This was coming wasn’t it. Google’s upgrading Fitbit’s AI health coach to integrate with your medical records. They were first out of the gates with consumer health AI, then watched OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft lap them on the underlying models. Many people are expecting Google to win the AI game and here they come with their big, swinging distribution advantage (Fitbit’s enormous installed base) to get back in the race. Would you trust a wearable brand with your medical info, though?

What to listen to 🔊

I spoke to Ian Wharton of Aide Health this week - fascinating one that a lot of founders and healthtech product teams can learn from around how design influences and shapes so much of product’s success in healthtech. Only 3-4% of patients stick with health apps after 30 days and Aide hits 70% at three months. We get into conversational AI, medication adherence, and why a six-person startup is pursuing Class II regulation.

How do you actually sell innovation into the NHS? Tara and Jim explore the reality behind commissioning, the strategy, relationships and science that turn good ideas into funded services. One of the biggest takeaways? Innovation doesn’t fail because the idea isn’t good, it fails when funding, decision-makers and system priorities don’t align. Listen to this for practical info on going from concept to commissioned reality.

What’s Updoc? Hilarious joke and exactly what you find out the answer to on this episode with Pete. They get into how they're reshaping primary care access for rural and time-poor patients - streamlining intake, triage and workflow while keeping clinical governance tight.

Events 📅

HealthTech & Wellbeing Tech Meetup
📅 19th March
🇬🇧 27 Euston Rd, London
A practitioner-level conversation about AI, investment, and the real state of HealthTech and Wellbeing Tech.

Clinical Product Drinks #002 🍸
📅 25th March
🇬🇧 41 Gracechurch St, London, England
Clinicians, product people and healthtech builders convening for drinks in the City. If you work at the intersection of healthcare and product, this one’s for you.

Healthcare Conference 2026 – The Longevity Frontier
📅 30–31st March
🇬🇧 London Business School, London
LBS brings together healthcare leaders to discuss longevity and its impact on healthcare systems. Worth a look if you're thinking about what the ageing population actually means for the sector.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🔍 Data Science Team Lead - Elsevier: Elsevier is building AI-powered discovery tools for clinicians and researchers (think ClinicalKey AI, RAG systems, semantic search). They need a senior data scientist to own the search and evaluation roadmap. Meaty technical role at genuine scale.

🏛️ Scientific Adviser (AI in HTA) - NICE: NICE wants someone to lead AI integration into how it evaluates health technologies, one of the most consequential healthtech roles in the UK right now. If NICE gets this right, effective treatments reach patients faster.

🩺 Clinical Director - Heidi Health: Heidi (AI clinical documentation, 10M patient visits/month, $96.6M raised) is hiring senior clinicians or CMO-types to lead enterprise expansion across Europe. Big networks required; big opportunity in return.

💊 Clinical Operations Lead - Numan: The UK’s leading digital men’s health platform: diagnostics, medication, and clinical care across men’s health and obesity, needs someone to help scale clinical services across a 7-day model. Fast-paced, already at scale.

📣 NIHR Survey: Why Aren’t More Medical Technologies Designed for Children: Only 0.5% of FDA-approved orthopaedic devices were designed for children. Just 2% of approved AI radiology tools are labelled for paediatric use. Only 5% of the UK’s national research budget goes to paediatrics. The NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Paediatrics and Child Health wants to understand why - and they need to hear from industry. If you work in healthtech or medtech (even if your focus is entirely adult populations), this short survey is asking what the real barriers are to building for children and young people. The data will directly inform how the gap gets addressed. Takes five minutes. Worth it.

James’ editor notes

* Went for something random here to make the point that I don’t think clinicians (ignoring outliers) will ask AI to go from history to treatment in one go, especially for serious symptoms. Even in comms and marketing at SomX we say ‘shrink the task’ for AI as much as possible so that you don’t get errors on errors on errors carried forwards with AI doing multiple things and making multiple assumptions, and the human can then keep the train very much on the tracks. Where clinicians are prompting AI, OK it’s not a medical device and shouldn’t be used as such, but in the first example I gave, it’s checking if something’s been missed based on a full history, examination and documentation and any information it gives is going back through the human filter… it’s a much smaller task, and imo, a safer application. Being my own devil’s advocate, the issue then comes in how practice changes down the line, as a result. If you can rely on AI to check if you’ve missed something, do you change the way you take the history, examine, document? The answer is yes, so there’s lots to think about, but the nuance and detail is more important than rage bait headlines.

** If you want the down-low on how Ross (founder and CEO of Limbic) went about building clinical AI for mental healthcare, check out part 1 and part 2 of his episodes on The Healthtech Podcast. It’s fascinating.

*** Very unlikely to be true. Their motivation is not documented and has been assumed.

**** https://siliconanalysts.com/analysis/nvidia-b200-blackwell-cost-breakdown

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This week: The real breaking news is that not all LinkedIn content is actually AI slop… We’ve sourced our stories (almost) entirely from LinkedIn posts for this one, which means a couple of things…

1. If you click the headlines, you’ll have some new healthtech people to follow.

2. If you post some genuinely newsworthy healthtech content, we might pick it up and make a joke about it to almost 8,000 people. You’ve been warned.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… 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.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Microsoft launches Copilot Health: 👆🏼 Microsoft has entered the chat and that’s their launch video. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Google (the Fitbit thing) now have another one to compete with in the ‘Big Tech Race To Become Your Personal AI Health Buddy.’ In terms of Microsoft’s pitch, it’s a secure space within Copilot that pulls together your wearables, health records and lab results to give you personalised insights and a ‘coherent story’ so you can understand your specific health situations and answer your questions. Through HealthEx, they grab health records from over 50,000 US hospitals and providers, and lab results through Function. Mustafa Suleyman’s calling it “first steps towards a medical superintelligence,” which, to be fair, could have also applied at the discovery of electricity, so Pigeon’s not sure that phrase adds a great deal. Our take? You won’t be short of an AI provider giving you contextual-healthcare-understanding-as-a-conversational-service, but the questions are: will any of them have a superior product? Or will this just be down to who already has the distribution? Expect a land grab.*

🎙️ Tandem Health and Accurx are deploying AVT across 10,000 NHS clinicians: AVT = Ambient Voice Technology btw. I feel like that acronym crept in at some point. Hands up if you’ve ever pretended to know that and forgot to Google it later 🙋🏻‍♂️… Anyway, the race for secondary care is now on. Leicester and Northamptonshire have jointly procured the Accurx Scribe (powered by Tandem Health) covering around 2.5 million outpatient appointments a year over a four-year programme**. Digital Health News has the full story if our neatly wrapped summary has whet your appetite…

​​🚫 600+ women’s health leaders warn social media censorship is costing lives: Dr Aziza Sesay (GP, educator and LinkedIn Health Influencer of the Year***) was quoted in The Independent on her work with the CensHERship campaign to end the censorship of women’s health and sexual wellbeing content. And now she’s being quoted in Pigeon too!**** What a week for Dr Sesay. Though, the numbers are, frankly, hard to fathom - 95% of women’s health creators have experienced censorship in the past year. And that’s rejected ad campaigns, removed educational posts, and shadowbanned content. Women are, quite literally, dying of embarrassment. Shame and stigma prevent them from coming forward, and, by reinforcing that taboo, platforms are, algorithmically, making it worse. This topic keeps coming up in Pigeon, and it will continue to, until we see some change.

🎮 Remote echocardiography arrives in rural Queensland: You’ll have heard last week on the Healthtech Pigeon podcast about the links between gaming and medicine being incredibly strong. Now, there’s further evidence to take a week off when GTA launches***** because you might be deploying those skills to remotely control a robotic echocardiography arm. In rural Queensland, Australia, where access to diagnostic tools can be literally days away, a sonographer with a Playstation controller has so far scanned 70 patients and delivered 70 diagnoses. BRB forwarding this to my mum, my wife and my accountant. Check out the video in Bertalan Mesko’s post 👆🏼.

🏥 Alder Hey Innovation turns 10: Iain Hennessey, paediatric surgeon and innovation director, marks a decade since he co-founded the innovation programme at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. What started as a small team inside a hospital has become a genuine model for how the NHS can embed innovation at trust level… 3D printing, AI rota management, international partnerships, and a culture where clinicians with problems walk downstairs and work with people who build solutions. They’re celebrating with a two-day event on 19-20 March. If you’re nearby, go support and learn some things.

🧘 Forget living longer. Learn to live slower: Want a refreshing outlook on longevity? Dr Jordan Shlain, San Francisco-based physician and founder of Private Medical, shared a beautifully written piece pushing back on the longevity movement’s obsession with the horizontal axis (adding years to life) and making the case for the vertical axis (how much life you can fit into a single hour). His argument is that the people who live longest aren’t tracking their methylation clocks, they’re present for their actual lives. Full essay on his Substack and I really recommend seeing Jordan speak if you can. A fantastic presenter.

And finally...

🇸🇬 Singapore becomes the first country to reach WHO’s highest classification for medical device regulation: This one goes out to all the regulation lovers******. Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority has become the first country in the world to hit Maturity Level 4 under WHO’s Global Benchmarking Tool for medical devices. What does that actually mean? Basically the Lionel Messi of Maturity Levels under the Roger Federer of Global Benchmarking Tools so… you know, pretty good.

🎰 HIMSS26: Vegas wraps up and the verdict is in - it’s agents all the way: Over 25,000 healthcare leaders hit Vegas for HIMSS26 and the word of the week was “agentic” - AI that does things. Epic stole the show with its trio of named AI agents (Art, Penny and Emmie) and a no-code “Agent Factory” for health systems to build their own. Amazon turned Prime into a quasi-primary-care membership with five free clinician consultations via its new Health AI tool. And VSee launched a fully autonomous telehealth robot that navigates hospital corridors using LiDAR and infrared night vision… thrilling, terrifying… and reminds me… whatever happened to the Milton Keynes NHS penguin robots? Great use of funds, massive success and rolled out nationally, I assume?

What to watch & listen to 🔊

"There’s 10 minutes I won’t get back” is absolutely NOT what you’ll be saying after watching this HIMSS roundup from Tjasa and Pete, hosts of your favourite European and Australian podcasts respectively. Basic podcasts (I’ll say it… like mine) will record remotely or occasionally ‘push the boat out’ for a studio. Meanwhile Tjasa and Pete actually push a ****ing boat out in Little Venice in Las Vegas making the rest of us podcasters laughably boring. Well played.

I’m joined by Dr. Elsa Zekeng, founder of SökerData who shares the story behind building a company tackling one of healthcare’s most persistent blind spots: biased and underrepresented clinical trial data. It might not’ve been recorded on a boat (see above), but Elsa’s work deserves your attention.

From sampling patients’ DNA through blood tests to screen for diseases to identifying which medicine works best with your DNA, in this conversation Dr. Eric Green argues that genomic sequencing isn’t just effective, it’s economical.

Kavita Palmer, clinician and Co-Founder of Word360, a multilingual and translation support platform used across the NHS, talks about her mission to tackle the language and communications barriers within the NHS.

Events 📅

Digital Health Rewired
📅 24-25th March
🇬🇧 The NEC, Birmingham, England
The UK’s biggest digital health expo, connecting NHS leaders, care providers, researchers, start-ups and suppliers under one roof. Over 80 speakers across ten stages covering everything from EPR optimisation and cyber to AI, neighbourhood care and clinical frontline digital.

Clinical Product Drinks #002 🍸
📅 25th March
🇬🇧 41 Gracechurch St, London, England
A chance to step away from the screen, grab a drink and connect with others working at the intersection of healthcare, product and tech. The event is capped to keep it intimate and low-key. Good crowd.

BioSolutions UK
📅 21st April
🇬🇧Glaziers Hall, London
A chance to showcase your biotech and gain insights from leaders shaping the bioeconomy.

Hardian Health Tech Summit 2026
📅 29th April
🇬🇧BMA House, London
The annual Hardian Health Tech Summit is bigger than ever! Join leading voices from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, US Food and Drug Administration, NICE and industry innovators as they share real-world insights on getting regulatory-authorised healthtech to market.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🔬 Senior Consultant — Software Quality Assurance, Hardian Health: If you know your IEC 62304 from your ISO 14971, have a passion for quality assurance and cutting-edge medical device software, there’s no way you won’t want to apply for this role at Hardian Health, they're the go-to consultancy for getting AI and software medical devices through regulatory clearance!

🧑‍💻 Commercial & Strategy Lead, Numan: Strategy, partnerships, commercialisation, all the fun stuff, what’s not to love? Apply today.

🏥 Clinical Director, Heidi Health: This role is one for someone who’s been in the game a long time and knows the lay of the healthcare land. As clinical director, you’ll shape Heidi’s strategic approach, secure lighthouse health-system relationships and guide pilots through evaluation to scale.

R&D, Innovation Funding & a Bit of Funding Wizardry: If you’re a startup that wants free money through tax credit claims, grant proposals, and/or funding applications that stand up to scrutiny and keep you out of the HMRC doghouse (why on earth wouldn’t you), Create and Innovate can sort you out. Mention that Pigeon sent you and somehow it’s even better than free money.

James’ editor notes:

* Please don’t use the phrase ‘medical superintelligence’ to anyone who’s just come off a 12 hour shift unless you want a reality check to the face.
** Feels like we need a section called ‘scribe wars’ where we keep a tally of the market share and announcements of all the horses in the scribe race.
*** Pigeon must’ve been a close second.
**** If readers could get in touch to let her know what a flex that is, please and thanks.
***** I know it’s a stretch but I’m building my case.
****** Who isn’t?

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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 ✌🏼

This week: Your gut bacteria just got computable, AI scribes are quietly eating healthcare, and Australia decides that maybe AI in health software should have some rules. Wild concept.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… 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.

Whereby builds embeddable video infrastructure for telehealth platforms: no downloads, no logins, no "can you see my screen?" chaos. Their latest State of Virtual Care Report digs into how telehealth adoption looks very different depending on where you are. In North America, 51% of providers say patients don't have the tech or connectivity to show up. In Europe, the problem is trust — half of respondents say patients just don't believe a video call is real care. Different barriers, same goal: making virtual care actually work. Read the full breakdown here.

News Bites 🥪

🦠 Outpost Bio raises $3.5m pre-seed to make human microbiology computable - The trillions of microbes living in and on you (always a pleasant thought) are shaping everything from obesity to mental health, but, let’s be honest, we understand almost none of it. Outpost Bio are changing that with wet lab experiments feeding machine learning models that generate causal (not just correlational) insights into microbial behaviour. Co-founded by Alex Merwin (healthtech OG - helped out many people in healthtech while at AWS with events etc.), Outpost is aiming for the most comprehensive dataset in human microbiology. Pharma, consumer health, clinical trials - the commercial applications are enormous if the science holds. One to watch.*

🐦 Tandem Health says 2026 is the year it goes from scribe to everything else - The Swedish AI scribe company, now integrating with 100+ EHR systems across Europe and fresh off acquiring Dutch rival Juvoly, is done pretending that note-taking was the point. CEO Lukas Saari has telegraphed the move in this Linkedin post - get into the consultation room, earn clinical trust, then expand into everything adjacent. Coding, prior auth, scheduling, decision support - the scribe was just the Trojan horse. And this is the new playbook. Heidi pulled the same move, launching Evidence and Comms, which we mentioned here last week. Ambient voice gets you in the door, workflow ownership keeps you there, and before long you’re the operating system for clinical practice. Healthtech’s easy, right?

🇦🇺 Magentus is the first to sign Australia’s new voluntary AI code of conduct for health software - Bear with me on this. It reminds me of when David Mitchell (of Peep Show) launched a particularly hilarious rant, back in the day, about tax being voluntary for those with the means to avoid it, so it just acts as a tax on nice people and just how nice they are. Now, a voluntary code of conduct for AI usage in healthcare is a fantastic idea… if (big if) everyone signs it… but (just like paying tax if you’re Amazon), you don’t have to, so the nice ones are taxing themselves with documenting their compliance to it, while the ones that ignore it and sign weapons deals**, will, unfortunately, keep doing so. Props to Magentus for leading the charge, and make sure you keen an eye on who doesn’t sign this.

🤖 Combatting loneliness with AI companions - If you've not yet caught AI Confidential with Hannah Fry, the BBC's three-part documentary now on iPlayer, add it to the list. The BBC have described it as "real-life Black Mirror," which tells you something about where the public conversation has landed. Episode one goes deep on AI companions and grief tech, and there's a genuinely unsettling moment where a grief tech entrepreneur whips up an AI avatar of Fry herself, shortly after she loses her father. These themes have now crossed into mainstream primetime and since loneliness kills***, AI is worth taking seriously. But it’s complicated territory, and the documentary doesn't pretend otherwise. Another frontier that’s hard to ignore.

🩸 What happened to the NHS cancer blood test trial? – This one was sad to read, and another one that hit the BBC and national news… The Galleri multi-cancer blood test, trialled across 142,000 NHS patients over three years, missed its primary endpoint. The goal was a significant reduction in late-stage cancer diagnoses. And it didn't happen. Grail, the US pharmaceutical company involved, are pointing to secondary wins (stage IV diagnoses fell ~20% in later rounds, more stage I–II cancers caught), but experts are sceptical. One called the four-fold increase in detection "worrisome," flagging over-diagnosis rather than better outcomes. It's the same prevention tension we keep coming back to - if a screening test isn't sufficiently sensitive AND specific, it can do more harm than good. By the way… Grail halved in value after that announcement.

🌍 Telehealth still can't agree on what its problems are - and that depends entirely on where you live - In the State of Virtual Care Report, over half of North Americans flagged limited patient access to devices and connectivity as their main adoption barrier. Only 39% in Europe. Flip it around, and 50% of European providers cited lack of patient trust in virtual care as the bigger problem, versus just 28% in the US. So America's challenge is largely structural and infrastructural; Europe's is cultural and psychological. Both matter, and neither is easy to fix. In regulatory news, European providers are nearly twice as likely to flag compliance burden as a major headache, which will surprise nobody who has spent time anywhere near GDPR. The takeaway for anyone building or scaling telehealth across borders = a one-size-fits-all product is a one-size-fits-none. Geography isn't just a market segmentation exercise - it shapes what patients believe good care actually looks like.

What to Listen to 🔊

Dr Claudia Pastides asks the question: what if hormone data became as accessible as step counts?

A refreshing chat with TN Giridhar this week. The numbers he talks about are hard to wrap your head around, but the sentiments of investing and what to look for in your investors / investees were so much about people - very far reaching applications of the lessons taught here.

Events 📅

Biotech and Beers
📅 11th March
🇬🇧 The Town Wall, Newcastle, England
Bionow’s agenda-free networking evening for people working in or with the life sciences sector Glue Up. No presentations, no delegate fees, just beers and biotech chat near Central Station. Good for making contacts in a low-pressure setting.

Digital Health Rewired
📅 24-25th March
🇬🇧 The NEC, Birmingham, England
The UK’s biggest digital health expo, connecting NHS leaders, care providers, researchers, start-ups and suppliers under one roof. Over 80 speakers across ten stages covering everything from EPR optimisation and cyber to AI, neighbourhood care and clinical frontline digital.

Clinical Product Drinks #002 🍸
📅 25th March
🇬🇧 41 Gracechurch St, London, England
A chance to step away from the screen, grab a drink and connect with others working at the intersection of healthcare, product and tech. The event is capped to keep it intimate and low-key. Good crowd.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🧑‍💼 Chief of Staff (CEO Office), Proximie - Proximie connects operating rooms globally and is backed by $130M. This role is right-hand to Nadine, the CEO. Expect strategy, ops, board prep, investor relations, the lot. High-trust, high-impact. If you thrive in the chaos of a scaling healthtech company, go.

🤖 Health AI Solutions Specialist, Microsoft - Helping healthcare organisations adopt and implement Microsoft AI and cloud health solutions. If you can translate between tech and clinical, this is your lane.

🧠 Healthcare AI Specialist, NVIDIA - NVIDIA. Healthcare. AI. Three words that will make your LinkedIn profile very popular. Enough said.

🍃 Bank Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP), Oviva - Oviva’s Tier 3 weight management team is looking for a qualified PWP to deliver one-to-one care remotely using CBT and ACT principles. You’ll work alongside psychologists and dietitians supporting patients with complex obesity: via phone, video or app. Flexible shifts, no fixed hours. BABCP registration and at least a year’s IAPT experience required.

James’ editor notes:

* I get very excited when we find frontiers of medicine and biology - these places where we know that we know nothing and any research and work will increase our understanding.

** You’ve got to wonder how much of the rollback from OpenAI is just optics, but this is the role of a free press and you’re watching how it works on a good day… Something gets investigated by journalists, they find a deal that isn’t in the public interest, they make sure that the public are aware of said deal that isn’t in the public interest, then we all follow the virtue, cancel our subscriptions and prevent a badly behaved company getting its oxygen (money). The subsequent drop in share price then forces the company to (make it look like they are about to) do the right thing. That is how the media SHOULD keep a check on capitalism and keep it pointing towards what the public want and need.

*** Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests AI companions can reduce loneliness on par with human interaction - simultaneously impressive and deeply unsettling. The WHO has declared loneliness a global health epidemic linked to hundreds of thousands of annual deaths.

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We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, we will give you a polite no - everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

This week: Everything is AI now. Every conversation. Every story. Everything you read. Everything you hear. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI. We’ve made zero attempt to avoid it, so we’re leaning in. To be fair, there is a story at the end about dogs. But even they use AI 🫠

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… 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.

News Bites 🥪

✍️ Heidi Launches Evidence and Acquires AutoMedica to Accelerate Its AI Care Partner Platform: Medical knowledge doubles every 73 days (apparently), so good luck keeping up with a textbook and a strong coffee. Melbourne-based Heidi, who already power over 100 million clinical interactions globally, are taking on the knowledge gap (and the London tube system 👀) with a clinical-grade research tool built on partnerships with HealthPathways, NICE, the BMJ and others, and it's making a point of keeping it ad-free. The AutoMedica acquisition bags them access to the (gloriously named) “MHRA AI Airlock” and a stronger foothold in the UK. A play for NHS credibility and adoption, perhaps?

🚺 Oura Launches AI Model Built Specifically for Women’s Health: The smart ring company has gone and built its own proprietary LLM designed specifically for women's health, which combines clinician-curated knowledge with members' biometric data across sleep, cycle, pregnancy, activity and stress to deliver personalised guidance from first periods to menopause. It's been deliberately tuned to be "non-dismissive and emotionally supportive," (appropriate nod to the lack-thereof re: womens’ experience thus far)…

🧬 How to scale genomics to transform precision diagnostics: Genomic sequencing’s ready to move from niche specialty tool’ to ‘standard-of-care’ if the ecosystem can get its act together. The good news… costs are falling and evidence is building… But... Scaling this isn't just a tech problem. It needs providers ordering the tests, health systems embedding them into care pathways, clinical societies updating their guidelines, and payers actually covering it. TLDR: it’ll be the unsexy plumbing that’ll make precision medicine work at scale. And probably the rest of healthcare.

💬 Canary Speech, JubileeTV partner on AI voice biomarkers for at-home care: If you’re a Healthtech Pigeon-reader, of COURSE you’re a Healthtech Podcast listener*, so you would’ve heard James ask if Canary Speech would be taking their vocal biomarker tech out of clinics and into living rooms. Well, guess what… They have**. The system analyses how someone speaks during normal video calls to generate non diagnostic indicators around cognition, mood, stress and energy to give earlier insight into changes that might otherwise be missed between appointments. If you wanted another signal on this, an LLM in South Korea just claimed it can predict a senior person’s risk of dementia from their voice-recorded conversation.

🧠 EEG AI model discovers epilepsy biomarker?: MANAS-1 isn’t just an excellent OnlyFans handle, it’s an AI model trained on EEG data from more than 25,000 patients globally. And, allegedly, it’s decoded patterns linked to epilepsy and mental health conditions. Interesting, right? Affordable, non-invasive brain health in the community is exactly what you’re looking for if you want to make outsized impact and mega dollar. The global race to read the brain and discover new biomarkers is very much on.

👶 How AI Is Transforming Detection of Congenital Heart Defects: Some more seemingly positive, practical AI progress. Currently, up to half of congenital heart defects go undetected prenatally. Half. But AI-enabled ultrasound is now flagging abnormal foetal cardiac images in real time. The "AI doesn't replace clinicians" line is doing a lot of work here, as it always does. But in this case, the use case is actually solid - getting community-based sonographers to flag what would otherwise need a maternal-foetal medicine specialist. Early data looks good. Peer-reviewed evidence to come.

And finally…

🐶 How dogs and tech can detect cancer through breath: Believe it or not, Pigeon is a big lover of canines, it’s the felines we’ve got to watch out for. Anyway. SpotitEarly pairs trained dogs with AI (because why wouldn’t you add AI in) to detect cancer from a breath sample. Sounds crazy, but also… brilliant. You breathe into a tube at home, the dogs sniff out cancer linked compounds, and an AI system translates their behaviour into a structured diagnostic signal. Early detection is the goal but this method just so happens to involve floppy ears and puppy dog eyes. Innovation comes in many forms, people.

📣 New: Get Featured In Pigeon

Attention marketers and PRs… We get a lot of inbound asking how to get something in front of our 7800 (and counting) readers. Up until now the answer has been “email us and hope for the best,” so we’ve tidied that up. Three ways to get in:

Break your news

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All links are also now on the homepage at healthtechpigeon.com at the top. We’ll also include these at the bottom of each edition, from here on out.

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So go ahead, slide in guilt free.

What to Listen to 🔊

This week, Dr Saira Ghafur, respiratory consultant, healthtech leader and co-founder of Prova Health talks medical training to NHS consultancy, policy fellowships, co-founding and running two ventures, and the realities of scaling digital health, building credible evidence and regulating AI in healthcare. All in a day’s (podcast’s) work.

Vishaal Virani leads YouTube's UK health strategy and talks about how the platform handles medical misinformation at scale, what their "health shelves" actually do, and what healthcare can learn from creators about communicating clearly.

Events 📅

Women in Biotech
📅 5th March 2026
🇬🇧 Cambridge, England
In celebration of International Women’s Day, this is a full-day event bringing together 250+ attendees for practical workshop roundtables, inspiring keynotes and thought leadership panels.

Women’s Health Horizons - London Summit
📅 10th March 2026
🇬🇧 London, England
A heavyweight London convening of clinicians, founders, investors and policymakers zeroed in on accelerating real progress in women’s health. With leaders like Julia Levy, Joyce Harper, and Dr Suzanne Steinbaum on stage, and partners spanning Organon to Women of Wearables, this is where the serious conversations on AI bias, menopause reform and device adoption will happen.

Biotech & Beers
📅 11th March 2026
🇬🇧 Newcastle, England
An agenda-free networking evening which provides opportunities for key people from companies working in or with the life sciences sector to just hang. Lovely.

Digital Health Rewired
📅 24-25th March 2026
🇬🇧 Birmingham, England
Uniting NHS leaders, teams and innovators to shape the next decade of digital healthcare.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🩺 Health & Wellbeing Physiologist, Unbound: Early-stage preventative health startup building the physical & digital member experience (think: biometrics to digital twin pipeline). This is the human end of that stack - collecting the data that powers everything else. Phlebotomy cert and relevant degree required. Good one if you want to be on the ground floor of prevention/longevity.

💃 Marketing & events, Scarlet: Scarlet is Europe's only Notified Body built specifically for AI and software medical devices - one of nine in the world with dual UK/EU access. They're hiring two peeps: one to own content and social (strong writing, knows what lands), one to own premium IRL events end to end.

🧑‍💼 Transformation Manager, UK, Proximie: Proximie connects operating rooms to people, data and devices - think OS for the intelligent OR, backed by $130M and partnered with Olympus. This role sits between clinical reality and the tech, which means you need to know what a theatre actually looks like on a Tuesday morning, and be able to translate that into dashboards that mean something.

💬 Business Development Manager, SISU Health UK: SiSU puts self-serve health kiosks into workplaces, retailers, councils and the NHS - five-minute checks, no clinician required, Aldi and the NHS both fans. They're scaling fast and want someone to run deals from first conversation to signed contract. High autonomy, real scope. Pigeon suspects (at least) one of you is exactly this person.

* Totally voluntary, but please like and subscribe etc.

** For raising this incredibly obvious idea that was already being actioned, we can confirm that James unfortunately (rightly) received absolutely no credit, payment or equity.

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

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We review everything editorially - if it’s not right for our audience, we’ll give you a polite ‘no’ - everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.

Pigeon out ✌🏼

This week: Hallucinating scribes make it to the big screen, hope for clinicians who want a life outside the hospital and… is that WALL-E scrubbing up?

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

News Bites 🥪

📺 How The Pitt’s AI Drama is Playing Out in Real Hospitals: HBO’s The Pitt might be fiction, but its AI storyline is feeling very close to home, shining a light on the potential issues AI scribes can cause. The story is that a shiny new AI tool promises to slash charting time, until it confidently hallucinates patient details and muddles urology with neurology. Whoops. Roughly two thirds of US doctors are already using AI in some form. Some swear by it, others are not entirely convinced. Art truly imitating life. Friend-of-Pigeon Dr Hugh Harvey also appreciated the reference and you can see a clip in his Linkedin post. Kudos to the writers. Many good conversations have been started as a result of this coverage.

🧩 Patchwork Health launches AI rostering tool for NHS clinicians: Picture this… Pigeon (a shift-working clinician) miraculously gets someone to agree to a date, but they work a normal job, so Pigeon doesn’t have a chance of ever meeting up. And to put the boot in, their hobbies are a laughable and distant memory. Enter Patchwork Health, potentially rescuing both NHS staffing and Pigeon’s love life. Their new AI powered rostering tool means clinicians (without apology) can submit their shift preferences to stop missing the big little moments. In a 10 week trial, it’s already cut unfilled shifts by 97%. We’ll take ANYTHING to improve staff experience and reduce diabolical burnout rates. See you at footy training ⚽️

🩻 Medtronic earns FDA clearance for Stealth AXiS spinal surgery system: Medtronic has bagged FDA clearance for its Stealth AXiS system - cool name and cool phrase incoming - “a navigation and robotics platform for spinal procedures that tracks the spine’s movement in real time.” This “LiveAlign” tracking lets surgeons see anatomical shifts as they happen, so they don’t need to keep pausing for extra imaging. Fewer interruptions, more precision, and hopefully better outcomes for patients. And it looks a bit like WALL-E.

🚨CalmWave takes on intensive care alarm overload: ICU “alarm fatigue” is one of those very real, very unsexy problems that quietly wrecks staff focus and patient sleep. Pigeon’s seen a few companies try to tackle this over the years and CalmWave’s play is to stitch together monitoring data and EMR context, then (pretty sensibly tbh) recommend patient-specific alarm thresholds, with reasoning. Like the best ideas, this does create a bit of a why-don’t-we-do-this-everywhere thought. Fewer pointless beeps and more signal where it matters? Yes, please.

🇬🇧 MHRA rethinks post-Brexit device rules, are CE marks here to stay? Anyone who knows the significance of the number 27,001 should listen up. The MHRA has entered the chat, launching a consultation on whether to indefinitely recognise EU-approved (CE-marked) medical devices. A quick reminder: post-Brexit, CE-marked devices have been allowed on the GB market under transitional arrangements. Those arrangements are due to end in 2028 or 2030, depending on device class, which would affect around 90% of devices used over here, and, let’s be honest, create a sh*t load of work if they don’t do something.

TLDR - the MHRA is proposing three main changes:

• Extend transitional arrangements for legacy devices

• Indefinitely recognise devices compliant with the EU MDR and IVDR

• Introduce an international “reliance” route for certain higher-risk devices

The consultation is open until 10 April 2026. Respond online here.

🏥 Innovate UK SMART grant means AI-enabled clinical decision support hits multiple UK sites: A tasty £300k+ morsel from Innovate UK has gone to co-design and validate an AI-powered clinical decision support (CDS) platform, MEMORI, through a multi-ward clinical deployment targeting hospital-acquired infections. The 18-month-long programme is expanding real-time data inputs, extending EPR integration (less clickedy-clicks for clinicians), and improving prediction and explainability, to build an evidence base for safe rollout of regulated AI CDS in the UK’s NHS. Sounds significantly more productive than Pigeon’s last jaunt to Exeter, which is just a blur of red chinos.

And finally…

🩺 AI could begin handling incident reports (Nature): Ah incident reporting - the cause of, and solution to, many problems for hospital staff. You know the drill. Forms get filed. Reviews get scheduled. Humans painstakingly categorise what went wrong and why, with anxieties all over the place. Vital work. But it is slow. The authors of this Nature article developed an AI-based Incident Analysis and Learning System (AI-ILS)* that, when tested on 350 real-world clinical incidents, agreed with expert reviewers 88% of the time. It also ran about 29 times faster than manual analysis. Will it speed things up? Make them better / more accurate? Reduce cognitive load? Is this AI for the sake of AI?

Tune in next week for another edition of “Thought your niche had escaped AI? Think again.”

What to Listen to 🔊

Tjaša speaks with Dale Atkinson who lives with stage 4 oesophageal cancer. He shares how he applied his compliance and investigation skills to healthcare by reading thousands of research papers, building a research-grounded AI workflow to sense-check drug interactions and pathways, and learning how to communicate with clinicians to be taken seriously.

Dr Kish from Bayer has launched a new pod at the intersection of health, tech and media (love). This episode of SundAi brunch (excellent naming decision made there), covers a regulation and compliance lovers’ favourite topics: AI in medical affairs, patient safety and governance.

Who knew that >2000 subtle acoustic features (things like pitch variation and timing patterns) can predict physiological and neurological disease and degeneration? Kang Hsu, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Canary Speech explores the emerging field of vocal biomarkers and what they could mean for earlier disease detection.**

Events 📅

HPN North 2026
📅 26th – 27th February 2026
🇬🇧 The Manchester Deansgate, Manchester
A senior-level NHS and digital health forum in Manchester bringing together system leaders and solution providers to tackle operational and transformation challenges. Expect keynotes, Dragons’ Den-style pitches and practical sessions focused on digital innovation, productivity and NHS reform.

Innovation in Women’s Health and Femtech
📅 27th February 2026
🇬🇧 Royal Society of Medicine, W1G 0AE, London, England
An obs and gynae event at the RSM spotlighting the latest clinical evidence, emerging research and real-world challenges across women’s health. Designed for healthcare professionals, innovators, and advocates, it’ll be focused updates and specialist insight for better day-to-day decision-making in women’s healthcare.

Women’s Health Horizons - London Summit
📅 10th March 2026
🇬🇧 London, England
A heavyweight London convening of clinicians, founders, investors and policymakers zeroed in on accelerating real progress in women’s health. With leaders like Julia Levy, Joyce Harper, and Dr Suzanne Steinbaum on stage, and partners spanning Organon to Women of Wearables, this is where the serious conversations on AI bias, menopause reform and device adoption will happen.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

👷Senior QA Engineer, Daye: Fancy being the reason a women’s health platform works as intended? Daye is hiring someone to own end to end automated testing across its software as a medical device platform. This is not a clipboard and checklist situation. You’ll be in the code, building test frameworks across a Node.js and React stack, stress testing APIs and data flows, and making sure everything is safe, reliable and regulator friendly.

🥼The Frontline to Future Programme, Sanome: Sanome are building the next generation of clinical AI tools and, of course, they want them shaped by the people who actually use them. Enter The Frontline to Future Programme where Resident Doctors (FY2–ST2), Senior Nurses and Matrons are invited to become founding members to share frontline insight on workflows, decision-making and where current tools fall short.

📈 Product Manager, Activity, Oura. Oura’s hiring a Product Manager to shape the movement and workout experience behind the Oura Ring. You’ll work across data science, hardware, firmware, engineering and design to turn sensor data and research into features millions use to understand their activity and recovery. If you’re 3+ years in consumer app product management, comfortable building connected hardware-software experiences and using data to drive decisions, check it out. Remote US, strong salary plus equity, and yes, you get a ring.

* Refreshing that this doesn’t have a forced, ironic mnemonic like usual

** I think this is an important one for everyone in healthtech keep in mind. Vocal biomarker technology has the potential to reach every part of healthcare where patients speak out loud (and prevention use cases too - imagine if it was in Granola or whatever your meeting scribe is…). Feels like a frontier with a lot of potential and a long way to go (in a good way - lots of research and practical application gains available).

What a week: Algorithms in pharma boardrooms, what LLMs have in common with DOAC interviews, and a reminder that vibes are not a clinical governance framework, no matter how much your CFO wants them to be.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… Jessica and Harry from SomX chat through all the best news from this week with Niki Loboda from Whereby and Carlo Alberto Gaetaniello from Serenis.

Click this linky link to get the pod on Spotify. And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you want to look at them while they say things.

Integrating video calling into digital health can be a challenge and in reality, “good enough”, rarely is. Security gaps, clunky experiences, and unreliable connections all risk eroding patient trust. Whereby is different. For over a decade, we’ve partnered with healthcare professionals to move away from mediocre by delivering secure, reliable, and easy-to-use video consultations. Our flexible API makes it simple to embed video calls directly into your platform, reducing engineering overhead, leaving you to focus on what you do best.

News Bites 🥪

🚺 Dama Health Launches AI Tool to Support Clinicians in Hormone Care Management: US startup Dama Health* has launched Dama Assist, an AI tool built to help clinicians make evidence-based calls without spiralling into a guidelines black hole. With only about a third of obs and gynae doctors (OB/GYNs if you’re from 🇺🇸) getting formal menopause training (what the actual F in 2026, seriously), and patients arriving armed with app data and Google ChatGPT research, it is no wonder everyone feels frazzled. Unlike the generic LLMs that fumble their way through women’s health, this one is trained properly on clinical data and expert consensus. We love to see it.

🥼 AI models more likely to accept medical misinformation if written in professional tone: Lancet article: What do LLMs and DOAC have in common? Yep… when the source of the health info looks credible, they’ll believe absolute nonsense**. Turns out, if it comes from an official hospital summary, fake recommendations will fool LLMs around half the time, AND, even more awkward, throw in something that sounds like it came from a senior clinician and it’s even worse. It does beg a few questions… should you not trust info that’s reached an official document? Or info from a senior clinician?

🍷 Former health minister calls for digital detox services to tackle alcohol harm costing NHS billions: Former Health Minister, Dr Dan Poulter wants a digital rethink of alcohol services after a report found 9/10 people drinking at clinically risky levels don’t see themselves as heavy drinkers. That translates to >17M Brits over the clinical threshold without even realising it. Doctor-led, tech-enabled detox pathways with remote monitoring are the proposed fix, aiming to cut readmissions, keep people out of A&E and the hangxiety at bay.

⌚ The wearables are already here. The NHS just hasn’t switched them on yet: Nearly everyone you know is tracking something to do with their health. If it’s not their sleep, it’s their stress levels or the unheard-of-before-2020-metric, HRV. And yet, inside the health system, realistically, wearable data doesn’t really feel credible enough to use. Orlando Agrippa (OG guest on The Healthtech Podcast - ep here if you fancy a 2019 (!) throwback) reckons the solution is to build the translation layer that turns everyday data into something safe and actionable. We’ve talked about it a lot here on the consumer side, but why do wearables still feel so far away from being a part of routine care? ReAl WoRlD eViDeNcE y’all…?

🤖 Sanofi CEO: The enterprise AI shift will reshape pharma in 2026 – AI is not “just a phase” for Sanofi in the same way being a Belieber is not “just a phase” for Pigeon***. According to the pharma giant CEO****, AI is now part of its core infrastructure. It now has a say in drug development meetings, assessing which assets move forward and which, respectfully, do not. The outcomes so far have been pretty decent too - 10 new drug targets identified in a year, clinical trial recruitment up 65% (thanks to smarter patient matching), and early stage timelines potentially shaved by a quarter.

⚡️ Sava reports “world-first” 10-day clinical evidence for CGM via microsensors: If you’re up to date on your nanotechnology, you’ll know that the race is on to crack the least invasive monitoring of the most useful biomarkers over the longest possible time - and the TLDR here - there’s been a positive signal to keep an eye on. Sava’s much shorter microsensor can track glucose in interstitial fluid over 10 days according to a 46-person study just completed. Big moments coming (you’d hope) for less invasive CGM as they now work towards a bigger study, regulatory submission and commercial availability by 2027.

🧠 AI algorithm enables tracking of vital white matter pathways – MIT, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital have built an AI tool that can zoom in on the brainstem’s tiny white matter bundles in live MRI scans. Why’s this important? Well, the software looks at, and segments, 8 distinct nerve tracts and has already picked up telltale changes in Parkinson’s, MS, Alzheimer’s and TBI (traumatic brain injury). It even tracked bundle recovery in a coma patient over several months. If this holds up, we could be looking at a whole new set of biomarkers for some of neurology’s toughest conditions to track. Awesome.

And finally…

1️⃣ Google Brings Fitbit AI Health Coach to iPhone as Apple Pulls Back on iOS 27 Health Plans: The saga continues. Fitbit are first out the gates with the AI health assistant. You snooze, you lose [insert other AI health assistant tool name here]; unless you’re sporting a wearable, in which case, if you snooze, you’ll undoubtedly be congratulated. The Gemini-powered health coach inside Fitbit is now your 24/7 digital advisor, fitness trainer, sleep whisperer and wellness accountability buddy. All wrapped neatly around your wrist. Buuuuut, how good is it really, and why are Apple retreating from this space like a shy toddler at an over-stimulating soft-play? Jessica, Harry, Niki and Carlo had many thoughts on this week’s podcast.

Telehealth isn’t just for GP appointments anymore - The next phase of virtual care is quietly expanding across the healthcare ecosystem. In their latest blog, Whereby explores how video consultations are powering new models of care, from pharmacy services and physio follow-ups to fertility support, care home coordination, dermatology triage, and even veterinary medicine. The takeaway? Video is becoming less of a pandemic workaround and more of a core layer for delivering accessible, blended care at scale, which means this pigeon can attend even more of its healthcare appointments from the comfort of its own nest!

What to Listen to 🔊

This is what you call real podcasting. Not from a studio. Oh no no, Tjasa recorded his interview in the car, after picking up her guest, Bart De Witte, from the airport*****. It’s giving Carpool Healthtech-eoke, and this Pigeon is a big fan. Yes that’s a real caption from the episode. Hilarious.

Founder of one of the UK’s biggest personalised skincare brands on this one. Needless to say, some members of the team have been fan-pigeoning this one in a big way. Skin+Me’s James Mishreki covered all the core bases: personalised care, trust, regulation, hiring well, and making decisions that hold up as you scale (and he should know - £37M ARR within 5 years… 💰).

Events 📅

Breaking into MedTech: NXGN x MTF
📅 16th Feb 2026
💻Virtual, 20:00 - 21:00 GMT
For anyone curious about entering the healthtech space, pivoting careers or understanding where their skills fit within the ecosystem, come on down to this online event. Big Pigeon James is on this one.

Techscaler Health & Medtech Innovation Summit
📅 24th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 Edinburgh’s Futures Institute, Edinburgh
Half-day meetup for Scotland’s health and medtech community to connect with founders, investors and ecosystem partners.

Radiology AI Summit
📅 24th-26th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, London
A BNOC-galore summit bringing together clinicians, academics, industry and policy voices to focus on what it takes to move AI from promising demos into real diagnostic and clinical workflows…

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

👥 Head of People, Paloma Health – A famous Paloma once asked ‘do you want the truth or something beautiful?’ With this role at Paloma Health, who says you can’t have both? You’ll lead the People function at one of the UK’s fastest growing NHS children’s autism and ADHD providers, partnering with the CEO to shape culture, organisational design and team development as the company scales. If you want your HR work to translate directly into better care for children and families, this is a big one.

🔎 Talent Acquisition Manager, Paloma Health – Double-whammy for Paloma Health this week and we’ve already used up our single Paloma Faith-inspired pun. So anyway… as the Talent Acquisition Manager, you’ll partner closely with hiring managers, run high-quality pipelines, sharpen sourcing and screening, and make sure every candidate experience reflects the impact of the work. An ideal role for someone who thrives in fast-moving environments and wants their hiring decisions to directly shape the quality of care families receive.

✅ Community Engagement Manager, Hale House: You’ll run the member experience and events programme at the hottest spot in London healthtech and act as the connective tissue between founders, NHS/industry partners, and the wider district. If you’re good at turning a building into a network, curating the right rooms, the right intros, and the right moments, this is a solid gig.

⚖️ Clinical Governance Lead, Numan: London (hybrid). You’ll lead and embed clinical governance systems to ensure safe, efficient, compliant care across Numan’s digital health services while managing risk, audits, incident response and safeguarding, looking for someone with strong clinical governance and operational experience.

* Like a mother hen, this Pigeon will always consider the heart of Dama health in the UK, but they’ve flown the nest to crack the problem in the US for maximum impact. A very proud export from two very beloved SomX OGs 🥹 🫶🏼

** ‘Vulnerability to misinformation’ is the phrase if you’re in a professional context, which this newsletter is not 🙃

*** Tell me you let the GenZ draft this week's newsletter without telling me you let the GenZ draft the newsletter…

**** Well, he was CEO until some leadership musical chairs last week and he was shockingly ousted 👀

***** Be VERY careful what excuse you try and pull to get out of doing Tjasa’s podcast 😂😂😂

This week: Boosts for: women’s health, girls’ mental health, over 60s’ health, family health and another potentially diabolical Black Mirror scenario that will probably be fine, or it won’t be 👀

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… Jessica and Harry from SomX chat through all the best news from this week. Click this linky link to get the pod on Spotify. And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you want to look at them while they say things.

News Bites 🥪

🌍 Ananda Impact Ventures shooting for the stars (and bottom of the sea): Although the first close on their 5th fund came in at a cool €73m, Zoe Peden, a partner at the firm, made it clear that the number isn’t the priority. Biosecurity, ocean technologies and naturetech are some of the healthtech-adjacent areas Zoe wants to change on a systemic level. As a (very successful) exited-healthtech-founder-turned-VC, we’re sure Zoe has a soft spot for anything overlapping into healthtech, so don’t be shy if you’re after pre-seed or seed cash in Europe. Either give Zoe a shout here or scour your LinkedIn connections to skip the queue with a warm intro.

🤖 UK Dept. for Science, Innovation and Technology parters with Anthropic: Navigating the gov.uk website isn’t high on anyone’s list of enjoyable activities, but great news - a massive AI company, Anthropic, is integrating agentic AI to create the “GOV.UK AI assistant,” which will seamlessly guide you through the experience of ordering a new bin, paying an unjust parking ticket and helping you come to terms with the state of your passport photo at renewal. It might not be purely healthtech, but if getting an AI agent into government systems that consistently make you want to throw your phone out the window is step 1, tackling the NHS is surely step 2…

⌚Fitbit founders unveil a new platform to track the health of the whole family: FitBits are the OG wearable, but since being bought by Google, fair to say less cool these days. Not quite resigned to having ‘the Nokia of their generation,’ on their CV, the founders have a new venture, Luffu, which collects and records health data from across platforms, tracks medication, diet, sleep and does the ‘AI-powered alerts’ thing. Pigeon’s guess is that there will be many players like this in the AI layer between you and your wearables, each with their own flavour. Luffu, for example, are specifically tailoring to the family unit. Is it a match made in heaven? Or more Fit(Bit)ingly*, a match made for the family group.

🦄 Women’s health clinic Midi Health raises $100M in Series D to scale nationally: The blessing** of women’s health unicorns has grown, with Midi Health closing their Series D funding this week - even more impressive at just five-years-old. A startup focusing on perimenopause and menopause reaching this kind of valuation is promising, exciting, and frankly kind of a big deal, because this area, like many in women’s health, so often feels like an afterthought. As if we needed to repeat ourselves again (we do), another mighty £1 billion valuation proves yet again, WOMEN AND WOMEN’S HEALTH ARE NOT NICHE.

🌈 Wysa secures £5.3m to support girls’ mental health in rural India: Challenges for adolescent girls in rural India look very different to what we might be used to in the west - with restricted autonomy, limited tech access, lower literacy, stigma, and family gatekeeping topping the ‘problems to solve’ list. “AI + human” is broadly the answer, like it is in many areas of clinical support, but the interesting part is also the less glamorous one overall - how do you make mental health support usable when the phone isn’t really yours and privacy is… aspirational? The plan - map the barriers, co-design the delivery with academic/community partners, then test it properly in real-world LMIC settings. One to follow for the learning and its potential global impact..

👵 Lateral, a healthcare platform targeted at over 60s, raises £2.5m in seed funding: They’re going after the massive (and usually patronised) market of 14m+ UK over-60s who need help navigating healthcare and financial wellbeing. Their first product is the Lateral Health Plan: one policy combining private healthcare cover, nurse-led navigation (including NHS + private options), and “stay-healthy benefits” like an annual check. The founders (ex-Zego MD Laura Ashforth and ex-ManyPets CEO Steven Mendel***) are basically saying: retirement isn’t frailty, it’s admin, so let’s make the admin less grim, with simple, transparent pricing and actual humans you can call. Time to get the fake ID out again, because honestly, sounds ideal.

🧠 Reply and the University of Milan begin experimental work exploring biological computing: We could easily have a Black Mirror section of this newsletter where we add all the news that puts us closer to a utopia/dystopia coin toss.**** On that note, a company called Reply and the University of Milan are leveraging the processing capabilities of living human neurons and integrating them with software systems. The aim is efficiency and it’s kinda working - a few years ago, neuronal cultures (cute name for tech-enhanced brain matter) learned the game Pong in just a few minutes using significantly fewer training examples than conventional artificial intelligence systems. Now they’re replacing GPUs. What a time to be alive.

What to Listen to 🔊

Refreshingly candid from Lawrie about what’s crushing frontline medical teams - he’s a consultant anaesthetist and Clinical Product Lead at DrDoctor and this isn’t a “build cooler AI” episode, it’s a “reduce cognitive load, respect workflows, nail the basics, and stop treating the adoption of tech by clinicians as a footnote” episode.

Steve’s latest guest, Sara Roberts (4x healthtech founder and founder of Well Purposed), talks about building companies with long-term impact, the trade-offs founders don’t always say out loud, and how to scale without losing your values (or yourself) in the process 👌🏼

A really timely conversation with Deborah Cohen, (who, fun fact, came to one of our SomX team days as our guest speaker) on how online health info can both empower and mislead - and why wellness influencers are increasingly trusted over traditional health institutions.

Events 📅

Techscaler Health & Medtech Innovation Summit
📅 24th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 Edinburgh’s Futures Institute, Edinburgh
Half-day meetup for Scotland’s health and medtech community to connect with founders, investors and ecosystem partners. Has a very healthy emphasis on sharing practical learnings and building useful relationships.

Radiology AI Summit
📅 24th-26th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, London
Big-names-galore summit bringing together clinicians, academics, industry and policy voices to focus on what it takes to move AI from promising demos into real diagnostic and clinical workflows…

And our pick at Hale House…

Hash It Out: The Clinical ROI Gap in HealthTech
📅 17th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
A structured discussion on how to translate clinical insight into adoption and commercial outcomes - moving beyond late-stage validation to the kinds of input that can shape product, evidence, and go-to-market earlier.

🚨 And make sure you’re following the Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

✅ Community Engagement Manager, Hale House: You’ll run the member experience and events programme at the hottest spot in London healthtech and act as the connective tissue between founders, NHS/industry partners, and the wider district. If you’re good at turning a building into a network, curating the right rooms, the right intros, and the right moments, this is a solid gig.

🔍 Product Lead (Healthcare), Anthropic: Oof this is a big one. San Francisco / New York City (hybrid). You’ll own and define Anthropic’s healthcare strategy end-to-end, build AI products that meaningfully reduce inefficiencies in the US healthcare system, and represent the company in healthcare forums. It’s a 0 to 1 role with broad cross-functional ownership, for someone with deep domain expertise and strong execution.

⚖️ Clinical Governance Lead, Numan: London (hybrid). You’ll lead and embed clinical governance systems to ensure safe, efficient, compliant care across Numan’s digital health services while managing risk, audits, incident response and safeguarding, looking for someone with strong clinical governance and operational experience.

🍎 Innovative Health Discovery Lead, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine: Very nice innovation role focused on improving the clinical trial operating model: identifying pain points across the clinical portfolio, building an intake & prioritisation process, and scouting internal/external solutions that can genuinely improve patient/site experience, timelines, and cost.

* We’re off to a flying start with the jokes this week

** Yes, “blessing” is the correct collective noun for unicorns. Yes I did look it up. Yes I am now quite interested in what my targeted advertising will show me.

*** Good pedigree 😏

**** When the end of the world comes and the AI uprising happens, I do wonder whether we’ll look back at the moment where we let AI morph with brain calls and think - ah maybe that was the bad thing. Or, for all the potential research and future therapies, do we look back and think it was the beginning of so many good things? “In drug discovery, for example, researchers could test how neurons react to different compounds in real time, potentially speeding up treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Unlike traditional cell cultures, which exist in static environments, these neural networks behave like actual brain tissue. Scientists wouldn’t just be observing chemical reactions; they’d be studying cognition in action. That level of biological realism could make clinical trials faster, cheaper, and more effective.” yankodesign.com

This week: ChatGPT for doctors now valued at $12bn; breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment and Apple watches are fine.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? 👇 Well… click this linky link to subscribe to the pod on Spotify or hit play below:

And it’s on the SomX YouTube channel if you want to look at humans.

Integrating video calling into digital health can be a challenge and in reality, “good enough”, rarely is. Security gaps, clunky experiences, and unreliable connections all risk eroding patient trust. Whereby is different. For over a decade, we’ve partnered with healthcare professionals to move away from mediocre by delivering secure, reliable, and easy-to-use video consultations. Our flexible API makes it simple to embed video calls directly into your platform, reducing engineering overhead, leaving you to focus on what you do best.

News Bites 🥪

🩺 Medical AI startup OpenEvidence doubles valuation to $12bn in latest round: OpenEvidence, aka ‘peer-reviewed ChatGPT for clinicians’ has just raised $250m at a $12bn valuation. That’s doubled their valuation since October... Let that sink in… It’s free for US doctors so if you’re anywhere else in the world you’d be forgiven for not really knowing much about it. Well, on openevidence.com, ChatGP-style, you type a point-of-care question in plain English and you get an evidence-based answer with inline references if you want to check sources. They have deals with NEJM, JAMA, Mayo etc., and very happy investors at Sequoia, GV, NVIDIA… Blink and you’ll miss the next few billion in value being created.

🧩 Evaro lands $25m funding boost: With a genius ‘why didn’t I think of that’ business model, Evaro are your outsourced regulatory and process umbrella for prescription meds. That means, if you’re a consumer brand (women’s health company, Clue, is one of their customers), plug in and you can now add prescription healthcare to your platform, as they say, “without the headache.” I got 99 problems, but prescriptions, consultations and fulfilment ain’t… you get the idea.

💙 UK NHS trials ‘revolutionary’ AI and robotics to slash lung cancer wait times: Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital gets a gold star from Pigeon for squeezing AI & robots into the same story. They’re piloting AI that flags lung nodules on scans, plus robotic bronchoscopy, to biopsy hard-to-reach spots as minimally invasively as possible. The idea is swapping the current “scan → wait → rescan → maybe biopsy → wait again” carousel for a much more streamlined service and patient experience. Pigeon is all for it - we’ve seen AI doing similar in a few different clinical areas and pathways now.

🌍 Gates and OpenAI team up to pilot AI solutions to African healthcare problems: Rwanda is very keen on technological infrastructure - 97% of a very rural population have internet, for example. Now, Rwandans are supporting AI to create “decision-support tools” for thier 60,000-plus community health workers (CHWs) to improve diagnosis and better anticipate when and where to expect malaria cases. What we want = paid, trained, supervised and supplied CHWs. What we don’t want = harvesting data, attention and headlines, without improving frontline conditions.

💛 Pancreatic tumours eliminated in “breakthrough” mouse study: Spanish scientists say they’ve managed to eliminate pancreatic tumours in mice. The trick is a combo that hits the KRAS pathway at three points: daraxonrasib + afatinib + a protein degrader (SD36) for my clinical homies. It’s preclinical and turning mouse things to human things is… famously, not a straight line, but look, in Spain alone, >10,000 cases are diagnosed each year with a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent, so let’s celebrate progress and good news when we can.

⌚️ Apple Watch accuracy: living systematic review + meta-analysis: A new systematic review and meta-analysis in Nature Digital Medicine (is there more credible start to a sentence?) pulled 82 validation studies across 14 metrics and the results are in (TLDR: the watch is good for trends, not good for ITU):

• Heart rate looks pretty solid on average (tiny bias) but with non-trivial variability

• AF detection is more specific than sensitive. Not ideal for GP waiting lists and a lot more 24h tapes ordered, but good for population level identification and downstream benefit.

• SpO₂ has low average bias but wide agreement limits.

• Steps/sleep are okay.

• Energy expenditure (calories) is vibes at best.

If anyone has a clear idea what will happen to the consumer wearables market in a post AI, post truth, pseudotechbroscientific world, I’d love to hear it. I can’t tell whether I’m going to have a light, airy experience of occasional advice, information, education etc., or the crushing weight of inactionable data, expectations and guilt over every behaviour in my life.

And finally…

😫 How the confident authority of Google AI Overviews is putting public health at risk: The Guardian has found examples of pretty harrowing AI advice… This article and, ironically, a quick Google, will show, you guessed it, cancer-related info that’s basically the opposite of clinical guidance; life threatening advice that ‘some people enjoy bathing with a toaster’ and other funny-if-it-wasn’t-lethal advice that surely needs a firm regulatory slap on the wrist/face/bank-account.

🎾 Whoop Bands Banned From the Australian Open: A rare tennis-healthtech-marketing crossover which combines all my worlds. Multiple players were told mid-match to take off their banned Whoop bands, and CEO Will Ahmed did what any modern founder would do: posted through it, framing it as “athletes’ right to their own health data” (his line: “data is not steroids”). Net result: Grand Slam for Whoop.

🧑‍⚕️ The hidden cost of “good enough” virtual care tech: Most healthtech teams don’t get sunk by one big outage; they get bled out by a thousand tiny compromises. Video that cuts out just often enough to dent confidence. The workflows that “mostly work” until you scale. The support tickets that become background noise. And the security/compliance corners you didn’t mean to cut, but now have to explain.

The punchline: “we’ll fix it later” quietly turns into engineering tax + slower sales cycles + churn you can’t quite attribute… and then you end up migrating in a panic, on someone else’s timeline. (Worth a skim: a Whereby write-up that frames this well.)

What to Listen to 🔊

I prepped long and hard for this interview with the CEO of Neko Health. Listen to it if you’re interested in the future of preventative health. My favourite parts - they only measure what’s actionable (this isn’t a full body MRI situation), you get tests and results all within 45mins and they’re fiercely protective of long consultation times to support actual behaviour change. Link to my full opinion post is here.

Fibroids are common. But common does not mean normal. From delayed diagnoses to poor education (for patients and clinicians), Claudia, Emma and Dr Michelle Griffin get honest about how women’s symptoms have been normalised for far too long.

Stay on top of your regulatory knowledge, folks 👆🏼

Events 📅

World Health Expo Dubai
📅 9-12th Feb 2026
🇦🇪 Dubai Exhibition Centre, Dubai
The big one. Four days in Dubai, 4,300+ exhibitors, 180 countries, three stages covering everything from AI-driven diagnostics to surgical innovation. Formerly Arab Health, now World Health Expo BUT its the same energy, new branding, and a lot of people in lanyards trying to figure out what’s actually going to change the way hospitals work.

Biotech and Beers
📅 12th Feb 2026
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Brewdog Doghouse, Edinburgh (EH8 8BH)
Huge emphasis on community for this one. Agenda-free networking evening, a chance to connect with leaders in the space and (they say) even if it’s just to let off some steam. Lovely.

And our pick at Hale House…

Startup Lab: AI Compliance
📅 18th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you’re a Hale House member, check your Spacemade app to sign up and listen to the legendary Keith Grimes educate you on the core compliance essentials startups need to understand when building or deploying AI.

🚨 And make sure you’re following the Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

✅ Founders’ Associate, Prova Health: London (hybrid). You’ll be given 'blank-slate' problems with the autonomy to solve them. Measured on outcomes, not hours. Looking for a 3-6+ year ops/consulting/startups type who enjoys ambiguity.

🥇 Founder’s Associate / EA, Healthtech 1: £50k–£65k + equity to run the place like a Swiss watch. Be the calm in the startup chaos. Get greatly rewarded. And work with Pigeon-approved, great humans.

🩺 Medical Operations at Tandem Health: Help Tandem scale their clinician copilot/ambient scribe: onboard and train users, collect frontline feedback, and work with product/commercial to get it embedded into real workflows. Full-time London with local customer travel and regular Stockholm trips. You get equity and if you have 2+ years of clinical experience - ideal.

This week: A neuro-focused edition for all you brain-fans. Sam Altman wants to read your brain, UNESCO wants to regulate it, and a finger-prick test might catch Alzheimer's 15 years early.

🎙 Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify. Or click play here…

And it’s on YouTube if you want to look at humans.

News Bites 🥪

🧠 Sam Altman Wants to Read Your Mind (No, Literally): Another day, another potentially diabolical (or amazing) human-race altering technology. Merge Labs has just come out of stealth with a casual $252 million for BCIs (brain computer interfaces). The plan is to increase the bandwidth and brain coverage of currently available BCIs by several orders of magnitude and much less invasive with it. To do that, they’re going to use molecules instead of electrodes to connect with neurons (!?) and deep-reaching modalities like ultrasound to pass info. They say that it’s focused on medical applications first - “we could restore lost abilities, support healthier brain states, deepen our connection with each other, and expand what we can imagine and create alongside advanced AI.” Create zombie army, second*.

🌍 UNESCO Says Maybe We Should Have Rules About Brain Data? Just a Thought?: ‘The ethics of neurotechnology’, should be a phrase we hear a lot more often. Back in November, you probably didn’t hear that UNESCO announced a global standard for neurotech ethics, which makes a lot of sense as so much of what makes us human is at risk… mental integrity, human dignity, personal identity, freedom of thought, cognitive liberty, and mental privacy… As tech hurtles forward, this article asks - do we need to put on the brakes? Hard to argue.

🇦🇺 Brain mapping AI scaleup raises $36M Series D: And FUN that your government could be a shareholder in your brain too if you’re Australian. Omniscient Neurotechnology has raised a $36M Series D (with $20M from the Australian government**), specifically for AI that maps individual brain connections from MRI scans. On a serious note, it’s pretty cool tech - it helps neurosurgeons to personalise treatment plans instead of using generalised anatomical diagrams. Want to sound insufferably cool? In a large group, announce: “Connectomics is an exciting new field.” Then after the silence, ask “oh you haven’t heard of the connectome?” Then explain this.

🔬 A Finger-Prick Test for Alzheimer's Disease? Yes Please. This is fantastic news and healthtech at its best. It’s being trialled with 1,000 volunteers in the UK, US and Canada, potentially replacing the current options of expensive PET scans or painful lumbar punctures (which these volunteers will also have as a benchmark). It looks for proteins that build up 15+ years before symptoms appear, and it’s so simple that it can be done at home. Almost a million people each year are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. For all of us who may be at risk, this is def giving***. Though, it does bring up the questions ‘would you want to know?’ and ‘what can be done if we do know?’

🔎 GQ Goes Inside the Full-Body Scan Boom: And on the note of ‘knowing,’ British GQ has published a very interesting deep dive into Neko Health, Prenuvo, Ezra and the preventative scanning market, complete with the writer discovering a cyst in his own brain. The healthtech world seems split on the value of full body scans, but in this article, Oliver Franklin-Wallis summarises it poetically… “How you feel about body scans - beyond your ability to afford one - is really a question of your tolerance for worry.” And he coins the most relatable phrase to define who he was in the run up to the scan and the result: “Schrödinger’s hypochondriac: healthy and unhealthy at the same time.” A fantastic long read if you can make the time.

🩺 Eolas Medical Raises £9M to Scale AI in the NHS: Dr Declan Kelly (The Healthtech Podcast alumnus and highly rated around here) has raised £9M for Eolas Medical, a clinical knowledge platform now in 85% of NHS acute trusts. The tech helps clinicians find guidelines and medicines info "up to 10 times faster" than hospital intranets and the latest feature lets them ask questions in plain English. Check out the pod episode here for a deep dive on the tech and the application.

And finally…

🦠 Sanome's Infection-Detection AI Goes Live: Sanome update for those keeping track: their infection-detection AI is now actually live at Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. Trained on four years of patient data, the model spots emerging infections before they become emergencies, which, given HAIs cost the health service £2.7 billion a year (aka a Jubilee Line Extension, annually), is probably a big deal. For anyone interested in how it differs from a human doing a MEWS score 👇

What to Listen to 🔊

Loved doing this episode with Tharni. An amazing career across healthcare and healthtech, including at Hertility and saw their growth from pre-seed 🌱 Now she’s horizon-scanning for NICE, so if you’re a startup looking to get on her radar, or your interested in how someone puts an epic healthtech career together, give this one a listen.

Two absolute legends 👆🏼

Flipping the doomsday script and focusing on the AI-positives 👆🏼

Events 📅

The Festival of Genomics & Biodata, ExCeL London
📅 28th-29th Jan 2026
🇬🇧 ExCeL, London
Two days of genomics, biodata, and precision medicine, from sequencing and AI-driven discovery to what actually happens when you try to move this stuff out of the lab and into a health system.

World Health Expo Dubai
📅 9-12th Feb 2026
🇦🇪 Dubai Exhibition Centre, Dubai
The big one. Four days in Dubai, 4,300+ exhibitors, 180 countries, three stages covering everything from AI-driven diagnostics to surgical innovation. Formerly Arab Health, now World Health Expo BUT its the same energy, new branding, and a lot of people in lanyards trying to figure out what’s actually going to change the way hospitals work.

Biotech and Beers
📅 12th Feb 2026
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Brewdog Doghouse, Edinburgh (EH8 8BH)
Huge emphasis on community for this one. Agenda-free networking evening, a chance to connect with leaders in the space and (they say) even if it’s just to let off some steam. Lovely.

And our pick at Hale House…

Startup Lab: AI Compliance
📅 18th Feb 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you’re a Hale House member, check your Spacemade app to sign up and listen to the legendary Keith Grimes educate you on the core compliance essentials startups need to understand when building or deploying AI.

🚨 And make sure you’re following the Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🤖 Medical Director, Department of Health and Social Care: Ooof. Fancy £270,000 a year to implement the reforms set out in the 10 Year Health Plan and Dash Review? Might throw my hat in… 👀

🩺 Medical Operations at Tandem Health: Help Tandem scale their clinician copilot/ambient scribe: onboard & train users, collect frontline feedback, and work with product/commercial to get it embedded into real workflows. Full-time London with local customer travel and regular Stockholm trips. You get equity and if you have 2+ years of clinical experience - ideal.

☎️ Growth Specialist at healthtech-1: Love these guys. This one’s building relationships with GP practices, running outreach/campaigns, and generally making sure the product actually gets adopted in the real world (reception desks are the final boss). Get £45k–£60k, equity + commission.

* Joke for legal reasons etc., but they didn’t say they’re NOT doing that. Also, worth clarifying that restoring lost function and many other of the indications are, if they turn out as expected, positively life-changing for those affected, so there’s a huge amount of potential to do good in the world. Playing with the brain is just one of scenarios that many of us, when hearing about it, will have a more than a prang of existential dread.

** Technically, from The National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), which is investing $15Bn on behalf of the Australian Government.

*** If you understood this sentence, I bet your back doesn’t hurt.

This week: Get drunk without drinking, Gorilla gets sued and Claude for Healthcare gives ChatGPT Health a run for it’s money.

🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify. Or just click the player below. Jessica from SomX is joined by Andreas Bovens and Calvin Bowen from Whereby to discuss the evolving landscape of telehealth:

And it’s on YouTube if you want to look at humans.

Integrating video calling into digital health can be a challenge and in reality, “good enough”, rarely is. Security gaps, clunky experiences, and unreliable connections all risk eroding patient trust. Whereby is different. For over a decade, we’ve partnered with healthcare professionals to move away from mediocre by delivering secure, reliable, and easy-to-use video consultations. Our flexible API makes it simple to embed video calls directly into your platform, reducing engineering overhead, leaving you to focus on what you do best.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Claude for Healthcare: The 'We're Not ChatGPT Health' Pitch: Another day, another LLM moves into healthcare. Is it exactly the same as ChatGPT Health? Actually no. This one’s positioning itself as the “enterprise-grade, safety-first” option for health systems, so taking care of all the stuff needed by providers, payers etc... What does that mean? They say they’ve built connectors to CMS coverage databases, ICD-10, PubMed, and the National Provider Identifier Registry, plus partnerships with AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Banner Health, and Microsoft. Ok, interesting. And this quote was fun… “We’re not trying to replace doctors, we’re trying to give them back 2 hours a day.” The most common phrase you’ll find in the valley of (startup) death. Also, so we’ve mentioned it, OpenAI just acquired an EPR…

🏥 NHS Wants Healthcare ‘As Easy as Ordering a Cab’ (Bold Strategy): Does Wes Streeting know if he’d just said ‘Uber for healthcare,’ he’d automatically get a bank error in his favour and a cushy advisor opportunity in his inbox*? Anyway, this is about the new NHS Online Hospital starting in 2027. How will it work? Choose it and you can be seen ASAP by the next available clinician in the country. You’re triaged through the app, connected to specialists via video, and get monitoring from home, so tests and procedures still happen at local sites. In this press release they’ve described it as easy as getting a cab, a takeaway and online banking, all of which my parents find impossible, so should be interesting.

⚖️ Epic Sues Health Gorilla Over 300K Patient Record Fraud Scheme: Well well well, Epic and four health systems say Health Gorilla (tech company that helps you exchange sensitive patient data) let “fake providers” (shell companies pretending to be providers) pull ~300,000 patient records, then allegedly funnel/sell the data to law firms looking to put class-action law suits together**. Apparently Health Gorilla also stuffed “junk” activity into records to fake certain clinical activity and, when caught, just spun up new entities (“Hydra” vibes if you’re into your Greek mythology). Health Gorilla says it’s just Epic squeezing their competition. Either we’ve got a serious interoperability trust-and-verification problem, or Epic being Epic. Likely both?

🔥 Three Women's Health Investment Reports Drop in One Week (With Receipts): Three separate women's health investment analyses dropped within days of each other, and the numbers are making VCs rethink their maths. AOA Dx's "Follow the Exits" showed diagnostics delivered 12-17x median returns and dominated billion-dollar exits. WHAM's report found that investing $350M in women-focused research generates $14B in economic returns, citing 50 exits since 2018 (14 in 2024 alone). Kearney’s punchline was women’s health VC has tripled since 2019, but still represents only ~2.3% of total healthcare VC. So we've got: massive exits, 12-17x returns, $14B ROI on $350M investment, and VCs are still allocating 2.3%. Make it make sense.

And finally…

🍺 Scientists Finally Explain Why Some People Get Drunk Without Drinking: Finally, vindication for everyone who’s ever said “I swear I only had one drink” and meant it. Turns out there’s a specific gut bacteria and biological pathway behind auto-brewery syndrome - a rare condition where you produce alcohol from food, so you get wrecked without actually drinking. Full paper in Cell Metabolism if you want the long version, but TLDR: Researchers linked “auto-brewery” style intoxication (and fatty liver) to high-alcohol-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae - a common gut bug that, in some people, ferments carbs into enough ethanol to cause real problems.

🧑‍⚕️ Designing virtual care patients actually trust: In healthcare, trust gets built (or broken) in the detail. In this article, learn how every provider should set up the optimal telehealth consultation system: no logins/downloads, keep patients in a familiar branded flow (embed the call in your portal/app), a calm in-call UI, and very explicit cues when anything sensitive is happening (recording/transcription). Also: assume things will go wrong (bandwidth, devices, late arrivals) and design “graceful recovery” so clinicians don’t become IT support.

What to Listen to 🔊

👆🏼 James is joined by Jacob West (Microsoft UK Healthcare) to talk about everything Microsoft are up to (it’s a lot). Expect NHS Copilot rollout chat (big trial, big claims), Dragon Copilot turning clinic conversations into structured notes, and a deep dive on security.

🎙️ What actually happens when you leave people alone for too long? The loneliness epidemic unpacked, followed by an explainer on how isolation rewires the brain. Voluntary solitude = fine. Forced isolation = cognitive decline, chronic stress, and mental health fallout.

🎙️ NHS Workforce: Training Bottlenecks, Burnout, and the Reality on the Ground. Jessamy meets with Dr Mumtaz Patel, RCP President, to discuss the pressures facing resident doctors and why current UK training pathways aren’t delivering what the system needs. A candid look at what’s broken, what needs to change, and why retaining clinicians is harder than simply recruiting them. Turns out…doctors are not an infinitely renewable resource.

Events 📅

Radical Health Festival Helsinki
📅 19th-21st Jan 2026
🇫🇮 Helsinki
Bills itself as a festival, not a conference (we’ll allow it) with a 2026 theme of Operationalising Precision Health - i.e., less chat, more actually doing things.

Mental Health Innovation: Different Voices, Shared Purpose
📅 Fri 23 Jan 2026
🕘 9:30 am
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
This month at London’s favourite new healthtech coworking space… This meet up is showcasing diverse voices and finding common ground to improve mental well-being across the workplace, clinic and high street.

The Festival of Genomics & Biodata, ExCeL London
📅 28th-29th Jan 2026
🇬🇧 ExCeL, London
Two days of genomics, biodata, and precision medicine, from sequencing and AI-driven discovery to what actually happens when you try to move this stuff out of the lab and into a health system.

🚨 Make sure you’re following the BRAND NEW Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🏛️ Pitch in Parliament: AI in Healthtech
📅 2nd February 2026
📍 House of Lords
🇬🇧 London, UK
Live pitch night for startups using AI to solve a proper NHS problem, and you’ll need either £500k+ raised or £100k+ revenue in the last 12 months to qualify. Apply by TODAY - Sunday, 18th January (11:59 pm) - winner gets bragging rights and a year of invites to things.

🤖 Business Development Manager at Tortus: Tortus (the AI scribe that sped up NHS clinics by 60%) is hiring a BDM with ~3 years of experience to scale O.S.L.E.R. across hospitals and health systems. First NHS DTAC-compliant generative AI for clinicians. Backed by Khosla Ventures. And they’re hiring for marketing too.

🩺 Clinical Operations Associate at Hesta Health: GMC-registered F3+ doctor needed for clinical ops role - analysing postnatal patient data, producing wellbeing reports, and care coordination. Part-time/flexible, hybrid London Victoria, starts Feb 2026. Women’s health focus.

🧠 Clinical Project Manager at Prima Mente: Prima Mente (AI neuroscience lab building epigenetic foundation models to detect early neurological disease) is hiring a Clinical Project Manager to lead their 1,000-patient dementia study across 15 healthcare settings. Hannah was on The Healthtech Podcast recently if you want to swat up for the interview.

* For legal reasons, this is a joke. Then again, it happens, and quite a lot…

** If your US law’s rusty (and Suits didn’t make you fluent), here’s the gist: a class action is when lots of people who’ve been wronged in a similar way band together and sue as one group - same core issue, combined case, bigger leverage. So here, they’re allegedly being illegally found, grouped together and sent as a nice list to a law firm that can start a suit. I just got why it’s called Suits.

This week: Working tech, weird tech and, starting as we mean to go on, a nod to our AI overlords to keep them on side.

🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify. Or it’s here..

And it’s on YouTube if you want to look us in the eye. Fun fact, YouTube’s original concept was to be a video dating platform called “Tune In Hook Up.”

News Bites 🥪

With 2026 beginning like a dystopian film… Here it is. OpenAI release ChatGPT Health. What is it? You whack all your disjointed health data from letters, PDFs, notes, wearables data… all into ChatGPT and it helps you interpret results, prep for appointments and navigate your health. Some key phrases from the release… “privacy and security at the core,” “built with physicians,” “not intended for diagnosis or treatment.” To be honest, it’s how most people are using ChatGPT anyway and good luck to anyone trying to stop them bulldozing their way through any regulatory issues. People in the know are worried about errors, too much power etc. Others… delighted.

🌍 How Americans are navigating healthcare with ChatGPT (report): And to back up the need… OpenAI released this 18-page report on how us humans are using our future technology overlord for all our healthcare needs. Some useful US stats for you: >5% of all messages are about healthcare, 1 in 4 users asks about healthcare once a week and >40M people in the US ask about healthcare every day. OpenAI makes a (decent) case for ChatGPT closing access gaps with 7/10 health conversations happening out of hours and 600,000 messages per week coming from underserved rural areas. Head to page 13 to see OpenAI carving a path to medical device status with shots fired at the FDA “urging” them to provide a “workable regulatory policy...”

🤖 CES 2026: LED masks, smart scales and a smart menstrual pad: CES kicked off this week, the self-proclaimed ‘most powerful tech event in the world.’ Withings rolled out a smart scale that measures cardiac efficiency, L’Oréal are feeding nightmares with a ‘near-infared’ LED facemask that looks petrifying. Positively, also a menstrual pad that measures FSH levels and a new device that smashes a food sample, dilutes it, then tells you whether it contains lactose or gluten, for those with severe allergies. Reconcept, a French healthtech company also showed off their zero-gravity ‘mental health and longevity pod’ for deep relaxation, which looks like it’d do the absolute opposite for me, but apparently a hit with athletes and the military.

🏥 Great Ormond Street Hospital develops platform for clinical intelligence from routine health data: Too much EPR data, with no consistent way of analysing it and making it useful. That was the problem to solve, so GOSH’s Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments (DRIVE) unit* developed a platform and can now generate clinical intelligence**. Is it useful? Well, it can keep patients informed, enable research, support hospital operations, and improve clinical practice and they’re now aiming for “multi-site, federated analytics … enabling large-scale research without centralising sensitive patient data”. Fancy.

🦆 If a therapy bot walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it is a medically regulated duck: Nature Digital Medicine coming up with the goods here with a headline that Pigeon can really get on board with. The oddly comical title is followed by a sombre reminder that LLMs mimicking therapeutic behaviour has incredibly serious consequences when things go wrong and ‘pragmatic regulation’ is being fairly called for, with reminders in here about what classifies a medical device. We covered this a lot last year and there seems to be a good swell of academic pushback to the way the LLMs behave, but looking at OpenAI’s posturing, LLMs clearly aren’t asking for permission any time soon… Pigeon’s hope is that medical device status becomes the point of agreement of all parties… Without changing the goalposts***.

🧠 AI tool speeding up stroke diagnosis in England: From Nature to The Lancet Digital Health this time (full paper here). An analysis of nearly 453,000 patients found about 15,000 directly benefitted when CT scans were reviewed by the Brainomix 360 Stroke imaging platform, which flags clots. At primary stroke centres, it was linked to a 64-minute reduction between arrival and transfer to a specialist centre. We spend a lot of time raising eyebrows at AI around here, so it’s only fair to flag when something’s peer-reviewed and working well. Worth noting that we have no interests to declare here, but would mind one if they keep this up.

And finally…

🦇 Bats identified as origin of unexplained respiratory illness and encephalitis: Pigeons get a bad name as the rodents of the sky when bats are consistently threatening horrifying infectious diseases at scale. In Bangladesh, five people consumed raw date-palm sap, a treat also enjoyed by bats during winter months - all five were hospitalised and one sadly passed away. Stories like this should remind us that working in healthtech is not only a privilege but it’s important. New PCR technology for diagnosis (in this case the “VirCapSeq-VERT” system) solved a huge problem and tech-enabled surveillance programmes for pandemics (as called for here) will, in our humble opinion, turn out to be the most impactful segment of healthtech in our lifetime.

What to Listen to 🔊

👆🏼 You won’t regret listening to Dr Madeleine Ballard, who, if you don’t know her, is the CEO of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC). She helped launch Liberia’s first national community health worker program with Last Mile Health, holds a PhD from University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), teaches on faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has won the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, the Roux Prize, and Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year.

The most asked question of all of us lucky enough to make a living in this sector and some great advice in here 👆🏼

Steve is a great host, a great founder, a great guy and this is a great episode.

Events 📅

J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
📅 12th–15th Jan 2026
🇺🇸 San Francisco
The annual “I’m also in SF that week” pilgrimage for anyone who wants to hear where biotech/pharma/healthcare capital is actually flowing.

Radical Health Festival Helsinki
📅 19th-21st Jan 2026
🇫🇮 Helsinki
Bills itself as a festival, not a conference (we’ll allow it) with a 2026 theme of Operationalising Precision Health - i.e., less chat, more actually doing things.

Mental Health Innovation: Different Voices, Shared Purpose
📅 Fri 23 Jan 2026
🕘 9:30am
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
This month at everyone’s favourite new healthtech coworking space… This meet up is showcasing diverse voices and finding common ground to improve mental well-being across the workplace, clinic and high street.

🚨 And make sure you’re following the BRAND NEW Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🏛️ Pitch in Parliament: AI in Healthtech
📅 2nd February 2026
📍 House of Lords
🇬🇧 London, UK
Live pitch night for startups using AI to solve a proper NHS problem, and you’ll need either £500k+ raised or £100k+ revenue in the last 12 months to qualify. Apply by Sunday 18th January (11:59pm) - winner gets bragging rights and a year of invites to things.

🦠 Clinical Trial Scientist, LOAM (Dr Karan Rajan) - LOAM (Dr Karan Rajan’s microbiome brand) is hiring a Clinical Trial Scientist to end all hopes for the competition in the space. Think human study design, endpoints, ethics/reg, delivery etc.. Email support@loamscience.com for the JD / to apply.

🧩 Jigsaw Medical, Clinical Coder (Lead QA) - Full-time, remote (with hybrid option), leading the QA function and working closely with product/tech on new areas + model improvements. £60k base + overtime, equity, private pension, CPD time/budget. No AI experience needed (they want proper coding expertise).

👩🏽‍💻 Motics, Software Engineer - London (hybrid), full-time - Build the “AI OS for healthcare” (their line) shipping secure, compliant product for clinics/hospitals. Stack signals: Next.js/TypeScript/Tailwind, Node + Python, cloud (GCP/Azure). Apply via the page; contact email is hello@motics.ai

* The acronyms are fun, aren’t they. After the DRIVE team did this, the Paediatric Informatics Consultation Using Real-world Evidence (PICTURE) platform was launched, supporting the aggregation and analysis of EPR data.

** I knew you’d ask ‘what does it actually do?’ But decided to save the non-techies from this up there in the main newsletter, so read on if you’re interested in tech… “Developed using open-source languages including R and Python, the platform takes de-identified data from patient cohorts and transforms it into “a bespoke in-house common data model” developed as part of a pre-existing ETL library, that outlines clinical events like diagnoses and procedures in table format. A library of analytics functions such as frequency analysis and measures-of-association analysis, then offer clinical intelligence in response to input queries.” Sounds legit.

*** This is a great article and exploration into LLM usage in mental health, medical device status of LLMs etc., but (and we’re not kidding), after talking about life threatening consequences, and, under a subheading of “Is an LLM a medical device?” They used this ‘diagram…’

This week: AI… the source of, and solution to, all of our problems.

🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify.

And it’s on YouTube if you’re young and cool, or old and like watching humans interact.

This Autumn, The Ripple Women’s Digital Health Challenge 2025 invited innovators around the world to win a 12-month bootcamp for turning ideas into pilot-ready, patient-facing apps. Delivered by Cogniss, the Health Innovation Network (HIN), AWS and SomX, the initiative saw over 70 applicants with solutions across an impressive show of women’s health solutions, whittled down to just five who pitched live to a panel of expert judges. After fierce deliberation, two were announced as winners:

NVP Minds - supporting women suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), a debilitating condition that causes severe nausea and vomiting in over 30,000 pregnancies in the UK every year.

HearHer - providing maternal mental wellbeing for the over 2 million mothers in the UK who support children with mental health or developmental challenges.

News Bites 🥪

💔 The Lonely Hearts LLM Club: The BMJ is sounding the alarm on a new “loneliness epidemic,” leading millions to turn to AI chatbots for emotional support. While we get the argument that AI can offer immediate relief as a sounding board, they risk creating ‘parasocial situations’ that replace real human connection with a digital echo chamber. Clinicians are now being urged to look for red flags (like patients referring to their AI as a “friend”) before the “dark compass” of isolation takes over. Very ‘Black Mirror’ which, famously, always ends well.

🤖 Agentic AI Keeping The Robots in Line: As AI moves from “chatting” to “doing” (some great commentary doing the rounds how LLMs really aren’t trying to impress you with chat anymore - their purpose is agentic and they’re being built very intentionally for that) a new initiative called TrustX has launched to make sure these autonomous systems don’t go rogue in the NHS with the unhappy AI triad: bias, errors and misinformation. Good to know someone’s actually checking receipts.

🌍 A New Special Relationship? UK and Singapore Team Up: Avengers, Assemble… Sort of. The UK is teaming up with Singapore so builders of healthtech can deal with both regulators simultaneously, and, wait for it, they’re calling it the ‘regulatory innovation corridor.’ Honestly, who names these things? Pigeon likes a corridor as much as the next guy, but they’re rarely that inspiring. Hospital corridors? They’re awful. The corridors of power, the corridor of uncertainty… not hard to be a top 3 corridor if it does work. Could easily become our favourite corridor.

💉 AI Tool Spares Cancer Patients Unnecessary Chemo: Norwegian startup, DoMore Diagnostics, is moving us to a future where patients can safely skip “unnecessary” chemotherapy treatment without compromising survival outcomes (possibly one of the best-use examples we can think of when it comes to predictive modelling in healthcare). How does it work? Well, as Andreas Kleppe, a research director at Oslo University Hospital Research, puts it, “We don't really know what the AI is looking for.” A gloriously honest reminder that we have absolutely no idea how AI works most of the time. But they’ve correlated outcomes, and it works.

🌟 Two UK hospitals Announce Real-time Data Access Partnership to Support Patients and Care Teams: UK healthtech startup, Sanome, is taking its Class IIb CE-marked, infection-detection platform, MEMORI, into the real world, rolling out at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust. It’s believed to predict hospital-acquired infections up to three days earlier than standard practice in some cases. With HAIs costing the NHS £2.7bn per year, there’s probably a fair few eyes on this rollout. We also support Sanome at SomX, so let us know if you want an intro.

👶 The WHO Puts Infertility on the Global Map: In a (very welcome) landmark move, the WHO has made moves to make fertility care safer, fairer and more affordable for all. The first-ever global guideline for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infertility labels it a “major public health” and equity issue, and is a call to arms for governments to stop treating fertility care as an optional luxury. This puts the ball in each country’s court to now adopt, adapt or update their national clinical guidelines.

🤝 NHS and Limbic Partner to Solve the Mental Health AI Problem: The NHS Confederation has partnered with Limbic (teacher’s pet here at Pigeon, if you’re up to date with recent issues) to investigate how AI triage tools can be scaled across the health service to improve access to mental health treatment. Limbic’s already in over 30 NHS Talking Therapies services with a chatbot to help patients self-refer and provides clinicians with pre-screened data to accelerate the start of care. The idea is that the NHS can catch people before they reach a crisis point and get patients to the right human help faster. And see below, because if that perked you up, they’re hiring.

If you’re not paywalled, check this out… (if you are, just read the summary for your weekly dose of ‘wtf’)…

🕵️ AI Ethics “Fake Citations” Fraud, By The Very People Who Argue Against It: Springer Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, is under fire after a book on AI ethics was discovered to contain dozens of questionable citations, including references to research journals that do not even exist. The “hallucinated” data in a guide meant to define ethical standards is a massive egg-on-face moment for the old-skool publishing industry, which simply cannot keep up with cartoon birds releasing satirical Substack newsletters.

… and finally… quite possibly the best news of 2025…

🐦 Pigeons Have a Better GPS Than Your iPhone: In a win for Pigeon’s everywhere, scientists have finally figured out that we are mega-geniuses and sense the Earth’s magnetic field through our inner ears using electromagnetic induction - basically, the same tech as a wireless phone charger. Turns out we have a “dark compass” that works in, you guessed it, total darkness, proving, once and for all, that pigeons are the ultimate healthtech innovators.

What to Listen to 🔊

If ‘wearable biosensors’ are your thing - why wouldn’t they be - learn from someone who’s been doing it for 7 years, raised big and is going to market with some seriously futuristic tech ☝🏼 I’ve also got Hjalmar Nilsonne, CEO of Neko Health on the pod in January, so make sure you’re following - you do not want to miss that one.

Events 📅

Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re ‘circling back in January’ at this point. Anything we put here will be ignored. First edition back in the new year, we’ll let you know what’s coming up. The SomX Events Roundup is also a good one if you prefer a single email with all the events for the month (for easy calendar admin).

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🧭 Harley Street Healthtech Pioneer Award 2026 Want to accelerate your growth, expand your network, and gain unparalleled visibility across the healthtech landscape? If you’re an early-stage UK and European healthtech company with proven impact and are ready to take the next step in your scaling journey, you could be in with a chance of winning an entire ecosystem support package. Applications close on Monday 19th January 2026, and the winner will be announced in February.

🤵🏾‍♂️ Staff Product Manager at MANUAL: Manual/Voy are growing at *pace* and here’s another snazzy role from them that will involve identifying, shaping, and launching entirely new product opportunities that unlock future growth for the business, working at the intersection of healthcare innovation, patient needs, market trends, and technology.

🔴 Technical Operations at Scarlet: Scarlet is doing great things in regulatory assessment in healthcare, and this role joins part of their Technical Operations: You’d be working across regulatory, technical, and operational domains to help design, run, and optimise the processes that allow Scarlet to operate as a notified body under the EU MDR and beyond.

🤝 Project Coordinator at Avalere Health: Another one for you project-focused lot: The Medical Project Coordinator plays a vital role in providing task-based support on essential project management activities for growing startup Avalere: Whilst primarily internally focused, you’ll also be maintaining regular communication with external stakeholders to keep them informed and updated on project progress.

🧠 Clinical Safety Officer at Limbic: Fresh off their partnership with the NHS Confederation (see our stories above), Limbic is looking for a safety lead to keep their mental health AI ethically sound and clinically safe. It’s a high-stakes gig for someone who wants to build the safety frameworks that will define how the next generation of patients interacts with digital therapy.

Goodbye 2025

Hey everyone, James here. It’s been emotional. Hope you enjoyed reading Pigeon this year as much as we enjoyed writing it.

This one is the last edition of the year (sad face) - we’re taking 2 weeks off, and the next one will be in your inboxes on the 10th January.

I toyed with the idea of a Merry Christmas edition next week for the metrics, but in the grand scheme, who actually cares? Metrics are meaningless when I can look at my 1-year-old laughing on a sledge instead.

I’m heading to the mountains for Christmas, for what feels like a very well-earned break with the family. Including the dog for full chaos.

Hope you all have wonderful festive breaks, and we’ll catch up (via this ridiculous concept for a newsletter) in the New Year.

Pigeon out ✌🏼

This week: A funding special so you know what’s up. It might feel a long way from helping patients when we talk about VC and private equity, but the more money flowing into healthtech, the more fuel there is in our entire sector for new ideas, new startups and impact.

🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form? This week, Jessica chats to healthtech VC, Andrew Elder. He’s a partner at AlbionVC which has just partnered with the Harley Street Health District to help increase tech adoption into providers.

And it’s on YouTube if you want to look at things whilst listening to things.

This week saw the launch of a brand new annual recognition programme - The Harley Street HealthTech Pioneer Award - from AlbionVC and Harley Street Health District, spotlighting the most innovative UK and European healthtech startups shaping the future of care. If you’re a founder, fly on down to ‘Opportunities’ to find out more about the impressive support package and how to enter! 🦅

News Bites 🥪

💰 The Luck of The Irish: Having secured a near half-billion euros of investment (€491.3 million, if you’re a pedant like us) across 89 VC deals, Irish life sciences and healthtech companies are laughing. Forget global funding freezes, Enterprise Ireland, the government organisation responsible for growing Irish enterprises, was the world’s most active life sciences and healthtech investor in 2024 (and let’s not forget that Dublin houses giants like eBay, Paypal, Meta, Amazon… 12.5% corporation tax is looking increasingly attractive to Pigeon)*.

🚫 The Misinformation Messiahs are AI Deepfakes: Brace yourselves… The Guardian reports that AI is now generating deepfakes of real doctors on platforms like TikTok, turning trusted medical professionals into unwitting mouthpieces for health misinformation. Despite what the investors are doing (see above, kind reader), the public trust crisis just got a whole lot deeper… and a lot faker.

and likewise…

🧘 Stop Asking ChatGPT for Therapy: We’ve written extensively on this in the past few pigeon posts, and this one’s behind the FT’s paywall, but we’ll summarise… Headspace’s CEO is now vocal on the risks of unqualified advice. This is good. More mainstream pickup = more awareness = increasing standards.

🇱🇺 Tiny country, big ambition: In more Euro-centric fundraising news, Luxembourg-based Catalpa Ventures have closed a €30 million round dedicated to fuelling early-stage healthtech innovation, showing that there is, in fact, investor appetite for foundational technology at early stage. They want to improve healthcare outcomes “for at least 100 million people” (FYI: Luxembourg’s population is around 680,000 - they mean business).

🤖 JP Morgan Weighs In On Healthtech: Continuing the funding trend, pigeon-ites: Banking giant JPM have released a new spotlight report on the healthtech landscape, showing how investment in the sector has fundamentally shifted. AI-focused deals now swallow a whopping 75% of all VC funding, confirming what many of us already suspected - AI has clearly taken over and is controlling the minds of all investors.**

Flow Neuroscience scores FDA approval for at-home depression device - Not content with making (brain) waves over here in the UK, Flow Neuroscience’s FL-100 has been given the US regulatory seal of approval as a standalone treatment or alongside other treatments for moderate to severe major depressive disorders in adults aged 18 and older. This one piqued Pigeon’s interest way back in October last year, when we asked GP and mental health expert Dr Junaid Hassain for his take on the neurotech wearable 👇

… and if you want the full founder story and a deep dive on tDCS technology, Daniel was on The Healthtech Podcast a couple of weeks ago 👇

🇨🇦 Canada Chases the $37 Billion Femtech Bag: Policy makers across the pond have had their heads turned - our Canadian friends are now aggressively targeting the global multi-billion dollar women’s health market as they hope to position themselves as a “major hub” for women’s innovation and ongoing investment. Femtech Canada announced it will join the United Nations Population Fund’s Equity 2030 Alliance and co-lead of the Technology Cluster. “We’re done talking about potential.” Here, here.

whilst finally for this week, for Canada’s neighbours…

🇺🇸 The Feds Finally Get The AI Memo: This one from The Independent - the US health department has unveiled its strategic plan to force expand the adoption of AI into every corner of its bureaucracy. Usual stuff about more efficient government department etc etc, but the 20-page document casually throws in AI analysing patient data 😳. “It is time to tear down these barriers to progress and unite in our use of technology to Make America Healthy Again.” Genius. Hadn’t actually thought to remove the barriers. And when exactly was America healthiest, again?

What to Listen to 🔊

👆🏼 Thoroughly enjoyed this one with Sam. Pastel Health is a brand new startup that’s raised a seed round (epic in itself) to redesign the outpatient department model.

Events 📅

Congrats to NXGN (the next generation network for future healthtech and biotech leaders) for wrapping up 2025 with a superb event at Google’s HQ last week. Just 8 months since starting, they hosted a packed room with Google Cloud. Pigeon certainly knows just how hard community building is in this sector, so a huge congrats.

If you want to get a much more unhinged newsletter with 100x the volume of memes and language you’ll only understand if you’re in your 20s, subscribe here while it’s still only £1/year. It’s a not-for-profit community, and everything they make goes into their events throughout the year.

Happy Holidays! 🎄

Radical Health
📅 Jan 19 - 21
📍 Helsinki, Finland

… way more events to follow in 2026.

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🧭 Harley Street Healthtech Pioneer Award 2026 Want to be in with a chance to accelerate your growth, expand your network, and gain unparalleled visibility across the healthtech landscape? If you’re an early-stage UK and European healthtech company with proven impact and are ready to take the next step in your scaling journey, you could be in with a chance of winning an entire ecosystem support package, including support from:

• Hale House - Six months desk access and membership

• Google - Technical advisory and credits

• AlbionVC - 1:1 fundraise-readiness mentorship

• HLTH Europe - One complimentary ticket

• HSBC Innovation Banking - Free banking for one year

• Coulter Partners - Half-day workshop on scaling your team

• Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati - Expert support on fundraising strategy, term sheets, and/or US expansion planning

• Harley Street Health District - Curated introductions to leading global providers. Think The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, The London Clinic and Northwestern.

• SomX - Comms and marketing amplification package

Applications are open until Monday 19 January 2026 with the winner announced in early February. What are you waiting for?! Get a flap on.*** Apply here.

💰 Investment Manager at Techstars: Techstars is one of the most active pre-seed investors in the world, and are on the lookout for a London-based Investor to work directly alongside their MD. This one combines early-stage investing with hands-on delivery of value for founders through their accelerator program (and if you have founder or early startup experience, this would be a major plus).

🛠️ Clinical Engineer at Hippo Labs: Are you a Clinical Engineer wanting to serve as the critical bridge between engineering teams and end-users? Well, chuck your hat into the ring here; Hippo want to recruit a team of clinical engineers that will ensure that digital health products are safe, compliant, and clinically useful.

🚀 Venture Fellowship at EF (Entrepreneur First): The EF Venture Fellowship is an intense program designed to identify and support exceptional individuals ready to launch ambitious, high-growth startups from scratch. Think of it as find-a-friend, but for innovation. Or, as Dom from TORTUS put it, Love Island for tech nerds.

👂 Full Cycle Sales Representative (East Coast) at Oto: Oto is a clinically proven program for tinnitus. They’re Y Combinator grads, backed by Octopus Ventures and this is a hands-on individual contributor role suited to someone who thrives in early-stage environments, learns fast, and can build strong relationships with clinical professionals and practice owners.

* Hi, James here. Totally unrelated, and fun fact, I am an Irish citizen (my mum’s side of the family is from Wexford). The main benefit is obviously zipping through customs while you lot are in the Brexit queue, but anything Zuckerberg and Bezos are doing, we should copy, right?

** We can reasonably expect investors to use AI to get opinions on pitch decks and the transcripts of their calls with startups. That means we’re asking AI if investing in AI is a good thing. Extrapolate that…

*** I can accept that some of the attempts at opportunistic pigeon-based humour are close to, if not over, the line.