Hello healthtech fans. This week you can learn what a PIGEON study is, the future of scribes, and how not to test a device (featuring an A&E department and very fatigued clinicians).

Hope you enjoy it,

James

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Suki raises $90m because being “just a scribe” no longer cuts it: You don’t see many Series Es in healthtech, so credit where it’s due. Suki, one of the US ambient scribe crowd, has raised $90m to build agents that handle the admin after the consultation.. the referrals, prior auths, orders and booking follow-ups etc. With the scribing itself now a commodity, value’s naturally moving to what the scribe plugs into and which processes it can take off a clinician from start to finish. And by thw way, they’re all at it. I spotted Heidi founder Dr Thomas Kelly calling “dibs” on Nikhil from Out of Pocket’s idea for a compliant personal AI agent for healthcare staff (see below). With mega rounds from Abridge ($300m) and Ambience ($243m), Suki CEO Punit Soni says “you should raise only how much you need,” which is a nice dig.

🚦 Scarlet raises $50M Series B to accelerate AI medical device certification: Founded by ex-Babylon pair James Dewar and Jamie Cox, Scarlet’s (the only?) one of the EU’s roughly 52 notified bodies that specialises in software and AI and they’ve raised a $50m Series B led by Headline (backers of Mistral). The customer list includes Flo, DeepHealth, Skin Analytics, NHS England, Heidi and Tandem, so a fair chunk of the most headline grabbing device certification has gone via them. I’ve had both James and Jamie on the podcast (latest one below) if you fancy hearing about what the near future looks like with AI, devices and regulation.

🇫🇷 Nvidia Buys a Slice of Doctolib (How Big a Slice? Non, Merci): Raising money is hard but a decent strategy is getting near Jensen Huang in a good mood and/or hope he sneezes and drops a few million. He rolled into Paris last week and rolled out having whacked a load of money into four French companies, Doctolib being the healthtech headliner. Nobody’s saying how much, and Nvidia doesn’t get a board seat (probably worth a few million itself). Doctolib says the money goes on hiring and building its own models (I’d lean on the latter in investor updates to Jensen). Those include a personal health assistant for patients and assistants for clinicians. That patient angle is the one I’m keeping a keen eye on…

🚑 Doctors Abandon AI as Their Shifts Wore On: This is a lesson in human factors and practicality when it comes to AI adoption. A Nature Medicine study put SHAKED (an LLM-based decision support tool) into one of two parallel units in a busy emergency department for four weeks. The AI was very accurate and supportive. BUT… clinicians stopped using it anyway. Within a single shift, usage fell from 68% to 30%. And length of patient stay was identical. Healthtech companies, listen up. ANYONE who’s done an A&E rota understands this scenario… you’re 3 months in, it’s hour 10 of 12 on your 4th night in a row and your whole body aches. What’s the likelihood you go over to a screen to check your decision making with an optional algorithm? Correct, extremely low. I’d actually argue that the best test in healthtech would be to give an optional device to someone on a 12-hour A&E shift and see if they’re still using it at the end. Also goes to show the value of interrogating the methods in a study. Measure adoption in the first hour? 68%. The last… 30%.

📸 AI Can Now Read Your Prognosis Off a Selfie (Almost): Clinicians, you know the gut feeling you can have about a patient, which isn’t related to any quantifiable metric. In a post-AI world, many believe we should be able to tun that into a metric. Enter the FAHR-Face model, trained on 40 million (!) faces and published in The Lancet Digital Health, estimates biological age and survival risk from a photo. If you look five years older than your birth certificate, your risk of death goes up 21%. In the highest-risk group, just over half died within 90 days (wow). Caveats? It was patients with cancer only, retrospective data and the signal held in 18 of 28 cancer types. A prospective trial in older lung cancer patients before radiotherapy is now under way, which is a good next step to see what’s actually working here, because my own gut feel is that this is useful. However (big however), whether patients want their prognosis read off their face is another conversation entirely. And imagine that algorithm finding its way into public CCTV…

🔬 Barts Health and Guy’s and St Thomas’ funding AI twins of human tissue: PharosAI is a collab between Barts Health, Guy’s and St Thomas’, Queen Mary and King’s, and it’s secured Innovate UK funding for DESTINY (honestly, these names…*). It tests whether AI can predict the expensive stuff (spatial transcriptomics, genomics, proteomics) from the data hospitals already collect. The long game is to apparently create “digital twins” of human tissue built with federated learning so the data never leaves the trusts. For now it’s a feasibility study, with up to £10m more available if it works. If it does, could be a very big deal for cancer care and drug discovery.

James’ editor notes:

* Since anyone can make these names up, I’m playing a game going forwards. For any… let’s say… un-robust studies, I’m calling it call it a PIGEON study (Predictive Intelligence Generating Exciting Outputs but N=1) 🐦

What to Listen to 🔊

Firstly, our own podcast, because if you like reading Healthtech Pigeon, you’d surely love to listen to us yap even more and watch our expressions whilst doing so (obviously once you’ve read to the end). This week we chatted Google’s Lancet study of its AMIE chatbot and wondered how it found its way into that publication, and whether women’s health data should sit behind a paywall. Spoiler, we don’t think it should, and a callout to the trackers to stop giving me pregnancy scares when my period is an hour late, thanks!

Have you ever sat down to start doing something important like writing in your journal, reading a book you enjoy or working on a project with a deadline, and then been sucked into the black hole of doomscrolling? Of course you have (not me when I’m working though James dw) and you feel awful whilst doing it but have no power to stop. This episode delves into the science behind regaining your attention currency within an online world that is begging for you to relinquish it.

Having lived with two medical students during my final year of uni, one thing I never heard the end of was how many logins and passwords they had to get through just to get anything done. This pod is the NHS’s own people explaining how referrals move today and where they get stuck. Not the sexiest listen, I’ll be frank, but since the Suki agent said it can do your referrals for you, this ep explains how difficult they actually are.

Events 📅

AI in Health Summit
🗓️ 4 Nov
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
The Economist’s take on why AI keeps stalling between the pilot and the ward, with trust and accountability on the agenda. Good timing, given the government just pushed liability back to a working group. lol.

The ABHI UK HealthTech Conference
🗓️ 9–10 Nov
📍 🇬🇧 Cavendish Conference Centre, London.
If Scarlet’s raise got you wondering who decides what reaches patients, day one is basically that room (MHRA, AI and what happens to devices once they’re out there). Day two is all about getting the NHS to buy, so if you’ve ever had a trust love your product and then go quiet, it’s your day.

How will AI and AI scribes change health and care?
🗓️ 12 Nov
📍 🌐 Online
The King’s Fund is giving AI scribes a whole day, with NHS England’s national CCIO and the Patient Safety Commissioner on the bill. Everyone’s racing to own what happens after the note (hi Suki), but I’d quite like to know who’s checking the note was right in the first place. £90 + VAT, with free places for people with lived experience.

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

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🚨 Frontline to Future, Cohort 2, Sanome. After this week’s 4am study, I’m glad someone’s asking the people on shift what they need before building the thing. Sanome makes early warning AI for patients getting worse in hospital, and wants resident doctors (FY2–ST2) and Band 6–8a nurses for about an hour a week from November, with evening slots that fit around rotas. It’s unpaid (you get a reference letter and a peer network), and sign-ups close Friday 6th November.

🩺 NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, Cohort 11. If there’s an idea sitting in your Notes app from a night shift, this is your nudge. It’s a free year of mentoring and pitching for anyone working in the NHS, clinical or not (admin and managers very much included), and it’s built around keeping your day job. There’s no funding attached and your travel’s on you, but 691 start-ups have come out of it since 2016, so I’d take the odds. Applications close 4pm, 20th November.

📋 Clinical Specialist, Expert Roster, Scarlet (UK, Remote). Fresh off its $50m raise, Scarlet wants registered clinicians with a specialism to give a few hours of clinical input when it’s certifying a device, on a contract basis. If you’ve ever wondered who decides whether an AI tool is safe enough for your ward, it could be you. A decent side gig, and a proper excuse to read the evidence section.

🥐 Director of AI Developer Experience, Doctolib (Paris). Doctolib says the Nvidia money is going on hiring and building its own models, so here’s one of the hires. It’s a senior leadership role in Platform Engineering, all about how Doctolib’s own engineers build with AI. Bring a love of croissants (and maybe a few GPUs).

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Hello healthtech fans. This week… Google’s chatbot gets into The Lancet, a tiny sensor gets big money, and still nobody knows what happens when AI stacks it in healthcare.

News Bites 🥪

🩺 Google’s AMIE Gets Its Lancet Moment (With Doctors Watching Over Its Shoulder): I might be missing something here, but 98 patients chatted to a bot called AMIE before their urgent care visits while clinicians watched the conversations live. None had to be stopped on safety grounds, the AI diagnosis matched the final one most of the time, and clinicians said the summary helped them prepare in 75% of cases. One of the results mentioned was ‘enhancing the clinician-patient relationship,’ though I’m not sure how that was measured. Also, it’s a feasibility study, not outcomes, and n=98. Head scratcher how this is in the Lancet if I’m honest, but it looks like the start of Google running purely-AI diagnostic pathways in parallel to what happens now with those pesky humans. If I had to guess, “helping clinicians prepare” and “enhances relationships” creates a bit of justification along the way. If I wanted to plot the path to AI-only pathways, this is how I’d do it. Purely my opinion.

⚠️ Four Deaths Linked to Philips’ Point-of-Care Ultrasound: This is bad. And exactly what we (in healthtech) all need to be aware of to put principles in place so this NEVER happens. Philips’ Lumify handheld ultrasound caused 4 deaths and 8 serious injuries and the fault was in the software.

See above image so I don’t have to explain the tech beyond “smartphone + ultrasound probe.” Basically, the app can suddenly fail to recognise the probe and block scanning until the probe is registered again, but… that needs internet. If you don’t have it, you’re not using the ultrasound. Now, why would you have this device? Probably because you’re somewhere like a helicopter, an ambulance or the side of the road with someone critical. When do you need the result? Now. Imagine turning to the screen and seeing “Please register device” and “No wifi…” I feel for the patients, their families and the clinicians affected by this. Worth noting that I don’t know the exact circumstances of the injuries or deaths, but let’s all agree we must do better. The FDA has issued an alert.

📋 Healthleap raises $38M for AI that flags patient decline: We’ve heard this a fair amount over the years, but at the current pace of technology improvement and general regulatory awareness and alignment, I’m getting more optimistic. This one reads clinical notes, labs and vitals every night and puts risk scores into the care team’s workflow by morning. Starts with malnutrition and delirium and they’ve raised $38m across seed and Series A, with Sequoia and First Round in at seed and Hummingbird leading the $30m A. It’s live in 50+ hospitals, (only three a year ago which shows the pace of adoption) and it flags rather than diagnoses, which, I imagine, keeps the regulatory burden manageable.

🩸 Sava bags £27m to prove a 10x smaller CGM: I actually had Rafaël on the podcast a while ago and visited their lab. Glad to see they’ve done this Series B because they’re seriously impressive. They’ve made a sensor that sits just beneath the skin and it’s about 10x shorter than a conventional CGM filament. The round was led by Ascensia, PHC Holdings’ diabetes arm, with Balderton, Norrsken VC, Simplyhealth Ventures, JamJar and Pentland also in. If you’re interested in more, have a listen to the podcast.

And finally…

💅 Do GLP-1s cause nail detachment, hair loss, and scalp inflammation? 575 GLP-1 users were compared with 1,329 people with type 2 diabetes and/or obesity. Here are the numbers…

• nail detachment in 39% vs 9%

• discolouration in 46% versus 17%

• unusual hair loss in 50% versus 34%

I’m now in the habit of just listing the caveats with studies in here because anyone who clicks just wants those, so… it’s cross-sectional, self-reported, no standardised exam, half of users had nail problems before starting, and a dermatology brand ‘supported’ the work. So… association, not cause. And conference presentation not peer-reviewed paper. Still, I doubt anyone’s put those in the leaflet.

What to Listen to 🔊

Tracking, tracking and more tracking. Science Weekly ask if CGMs could benefit those without diabetes. Are we seeing CGMs fall into a wellness accessory now? If so, how would that make those feel who have to wear them to protect their life? Not quite the same, but when people started wearing fake glasses (as a lifelong glasses wearer), I’d have traded for 20/20 vision in a heartbeat.

If there’s something that rivals the tracking epidemic, its the GLP-1 discourse. This take is from the Observer’s science editor, who’s on them himself, which seems more like an investigative exercise. James tracked down the scientist who discovered the hormone behind them, and now has his own concerns about how they’re being used (the phrase, no sh*t Sherlock, comes to mind).

Homework before you read the government’s reply (sorry). Last month HSJ’s tech team sat down with Annabelle to pick through the AI Commission’s final report, the one that promised the NHS a new regulatory rulebook. A tougher MHRA and actual fines for AI firms that harm patients were on the table. Listen with this week’s response open in another tab and you can tick off what made it through. My bet is you’ll get to liability and find the page still blank.

Events 📅

⭐ Platform Approaches to Regional AI Implementation and Monitoring
📅 Monday 19 October, 12pm to 1pm
🌐 Online

Our featured event happening next week is from the Newton’s Tree team who help hospitals deploy, monitor and govern clinical AI at scale. They’re hosting a lunchtime panel on how NHS organisations can roll out AI and keep it in check once it’s live. And it’s epic timing… AI diagnostics funding (AIDF round 2) has opened and the MHRA’s National Commission has just published its recommendations on regulating AI in healthcare. CEO Dr Haris Shuaib is joined by the MHRA’s Director of Strategy, Dr Ed Middleton, Prof David Lowe from CERSI-AI and Dr Claire Morris from Cambridge University Hospitals, so you’ll hear from the regulator, the people putting regulation into practice and a trust doing the adoption. If you’re buying, building or governing AI in the NHS, this is an hour extremely well spent.

Harley Street Health District Conference
🗓️ 20 Oct
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
Lord Kakkar opens the line-up and Matthew Syed closes the day, with investors, NHS London and other global health districts (Texas Medical Center included) in between. It’s sold out, but the waitlist is open, so it’s worth a punt if you want to know where the money in London health is heading.

Frontiers Health
🗓️ 20–21 Oct
📍 🇩🇪 bcc Berlin Congress Center, Berlin.
Health equity is one of the four main themes, which I’d like to see more events copy. If you’re already in Berlin this week (and hopefully heading to Berghain after), you’ve got good taste (startup passes are €495 + VAT).

AI in Health Summit
🗓️ 4 Nov
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
The Economist’s take on why AI keeps stalling between the pilot and the ward, with trust and accountability on the agenda. Good timing, given the government just pushed liability back to a working group.

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

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🔴 Medical Device Auditor, Scarlet (London). If the government’s AI reply left you wondering who is checking these devices, it’s companies like Scarlet, which is authorised to certify them and says it’s shrinking AI update cycles from months to weeks (with the change-control guidance due in December, timely). You’d be auditing manufacturers’ quality systems against ISO 13485 and EU/UK MDR, so it suits someone with four-plus years in medical devices and some software know-how. And the red pen is presumably included.

💊 Head of Clinical Research, Numan (Remote, UK). A 12-month mat cover leading Numan’s real-world evidence on obesity treatment, with oral GLP-1s at the top of the list. If the nail study left you wanting better evidence, here’s your chance to produce it (PhD and PI experience needed). It’s fully remote, so your cuticles can stay at home.

🩸 Clinical Data & Device Specialist, Sava (London). Fresh off the £27m above, Sava’s whole bet now rides on its pivotal study, and this is the person keeping that study’s data clean. It suits someone with a few years in medtech clinical ops who knows their EDCs from their eTMFs (and doesn’t flinch at the word lock). We’re 'already tracking, and now we’re getting a filament ten times shorter. Is it that we hate wearing tech, or that we hate the needle? And is it weird that I kind of like injections?

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

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Hey Insiders - you may have noticed that I skipped an edition. For someone as obsessed about consistency as I am, that was painful.

The truth is that a lot of research goes into writing these and, frankly, every fortnight was a bit ambitious to deliver the level that I think is useful. From here on in I’m going to write these big pieces monthly, and sprinkle in smaller pieces and thoughts through the month (likely to be all the opinions I get part way through writing on Linkedin before the premonition of getting cancelled kicks in).

Please accept this essay as an apology.

Thanks for being here.

James

For most of my time in healthtech, selling AI into the NHS has worked in a fairly predictable fashion. A start-up builds a tool that does a job, it runs a pilot, then tries to turn that into a contract and repeats the process down the road until it runs out of money. The industry calls these point solutions, and the NHS has bought a lot of them.

Ambient voice technologies (AVTs for short) are (were) a good example. So many suppliers piled in that NHS England set up a self-certified supplier registry just to keep track of who met the basic standards. But over the past eight months, a run of announcements suggests that the point solution model might be running out of steam. Platform bundles and joint procurement seem to be in vogue…

• February - Epic switch on AI Charting, its own ambient scribe, inside the record system most of the massive US hospitals already pay for. US-based, but you get the point.

• March - Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust signs a 3-year enterprise deal with Microsoft covering 6,500 Copilot licences a year and Dragon Copilot (the AVT), plus an internal “agent factory” for staff to build their own automations

• April - 4 South West London trusts agreed to put 20,000 clinicians on a single scribing supplier over four years

• May - NHS Shared Business Services published a £900m AI framework that runs until 2035

If you’re a founder and your business model right now is selling one tool to one department in one trust at a time, I’m wondering in this piece whether that’s really sustainable. It also raises questions of exactly how you set up to win a joint procurement or get it built around you, but I’ll come to that.

I’ve been hearing versions of the point solution model failing on the podcast for a long time and I’ve tried to test what guests are saying against what the evidence (public contracts and data) actually show. Because if this is a trend, founders and investors need to be aware of what success needs to look like and get ahead of it.

Settle in.

What people are seeing on the ground

A couple of views here from founders at different stages. One founder, who’s building an AI-enabled service for frail older people at home, tried to sell into the hospital discharge pathway, which is the most obvious ROI case in the NHS. Naturally, it didn’t work.

“Everyone acknowledges the huge problem. They want to hear about your solution, but they want someone else to pay for it.”

Sounds familiar. It’s the usual budget boundary story. Hospital says discharged patients are no longer its responsibility, GP says “God, no, don’t send us another alert, because we’re overwhelmed”. Real value, payer didn’t benefit.

Jack, co-founder of Sanctuary Health, an applied AI company that puts engineers inside NHS trusts to build tools the trust then owns, explained how many SaaS technologies are getting commoditised. On scribes specifically, he said pretty bluntly:

“I really want to open source a scribe at some point. I think AVT is a commodity technology. I think it should be owned by the NHS.”

Different vantage points, but the single-purpose tool bought by a single trust is under pressure. Extrapolate and there are a few potential futures here to be aware of…

1. The NHS builds its own stuff

Jack’s thesis. There’s some interesting evidence.

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust actually bought Health Call Solutions in March 2025 so a trust literally now owns software that other trusts use. I’ve also been told that Northumbria runs a large in-house engineering function building software it can resell to other trusts. I haven’t verified the size of the team, so don’t hold me to the specifics, but the direction’s pretty clear and very public.

However… there’s a healthy case for betting against this future.

In Bessemer’s 2026 Healthcare AI ROI Scorecard (survey of US health orgs), 61% said half or fewer of their internally built AI tools are actually maintained. Maintenance of AI tools is easily forgotten and anyone with more than a couple of scheduled Claude tasks and/or a Zapier account will testify to an automation never being fully solved and forgotten. As a result, effort’s apparently moved away from internal builds to specialist vendors. Now, let’s do some journalism here and appreciate that Bessemer is a VC firm, they have a healthcare SaaS portfolio to hype up, and US hospitals aren’t NHS trusts. Still, it’s data that doesn’t flatter the ‘build-it-yourself’ case.

Okay, but would the NHS open source a scribe? NHS England made all of its source code repositories private by default from 11 May 2026, saying that AI models analysing public code at scale = potential apocalypse, so it doesn’t feel like it.

NHS England also told trusts to stop using non-compliant ambient voice products, and made the trust, the practice or the individual clinician liable. So if you build your own stuff, you own that risk. I imagine that, alone, is a strong enough reason to buy rather than build.

So building in-house is happening in pockets. But it doesn’t look like the main force. Not in the short term, anyway.

2. Big platforms swallow entire categories of AI solutions

Here are 3 examples at different stages…

Clinical notes. When Epic switched on AI Charting, the press called it the moment all standalone scribes got “Sherlocked” (a platform shipping a feature that kills a paid add-on). Why buy something standalone if it’s part of something you already pay for and integrate into your organisation? Good argument.

The UK version of this is Microsoft. NHS England’s £10bn, three-year technology package includes Copilot for more than half a million staff and a national push to scale AVT, starting with outpatients. If you look at Manchester as precedent here, once AVT arrives as part of an enterprise agreement or a national programme, all standalone suppliers then have to beat something that looks free and without any irritating information governance, regulatory or other red tape issues. Even the South West London deal, which went to Lyrebird, made a point of the integration with Oracle.

Hospital operations. This is where the Federated Data Platform comes in. If you missed it, I went through the FDP in detail in WTF is the FDP?, so I won’t go over the whole saga again. The TLDR is that it’s one piece of software running separately inside each trust, with NHS-owned products on top for things like theatre planning, discharge and waiting list validation. In March, adoption was 86% of acute trusts, with plans to add AI-assisted theatre scheduling, AI-supported discharge summaries and a “Demand Centre” for triaging referrals (which had already triaged 26,544 referrals in North West London).

Now, theatre scheduling, discharge and referral triage are all categories start-ups have historically sold trust by trust. But here’s the twist…

Read more

Hello healthtech fans.

This week… Dating app becomes pharmacy, the government says yes to absolutely everything, and NHS England has written its anxieties down in a public document. Completely normal week.

Also this week, I can’t face a full story on this, but RFK Jr told the MAHA Summit that AI gives a better second opinion than any doctor. Basically this sums up the state of media pretty well… “uninformed person gives uninformed opinion, journalists cause a scene.”

You wouldn’t get annoyed with a toddler’s take on string theory, so I suggest you think of this like that. There might be a grain of truth buried in there somewhere, but save your energy. Until patient safety is seriously on the line. Then we fly at dawn.

Jessica and I talk about it on this week’s podcast…

James

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News Bites 🥪

🏳️‍🌈 Grindr Wants to Be Your Doctor Now: I mentioned this one last week, and since the dust’s now settled, let’s look at this properly. Grindr (LGBTQ+ dating app) is paying $250m for PurposeMed, the parent company of Freddie (provides telehealth access to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis), which serves about 25,000 active patients. That’s a whopping sum and Grindr’s CEO reckons its health arm could eventually be as large as, if not larger than, core Grindr. There are a couple of things here. I think this is a great example of healthcare reaching people where they are and an area of medicine that delivers better care with clinicians and process specific to its needs having a system built around it. But it’s also more proof of what feels like “Telemedicine 3.0: Become a full health system” with the likes of wearable companies and alike all wanting in on a similar model. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Grindr came out with a wearable*.

🤖 All 44 recommendations for AI regulation accepted: Remember Clippy? If you do, just think back to that glorious time when innovation meant adding emojis to MSN and bear in mind THAT was the last time medical device regulations were written. Lots to look forward to in these reccos… AI products can be updated without going back to the start of the queue, a shift away from front-loaded pre-market approval towards proper post-market surveillance, a public adverse incident database, and AI Airlock phase 3… But also lots of “explore” and “consider,” rather than “will execute flawlessly and immediately.” Good progress though.

⚠️ NHS England Admits Being Slow on Tech: The thought of all my documented SomX insecurities becoming public information is the stuff of nightmares, but a public sector organisation’s risk register is exactly that. Technology and innovation risk has gone from an 8 to a 12, with cyber holding firm at a mega 25, the top mark you can get. Why 8 to 12? Slow delivery on the FDP, NHS App, single patient record and ambient voice, a lot of organisations failing DSPT standards, and no unified AI vision. Ouch. Root causes? Capacity, money, recruitment, approval bottlenecks and projects with no detailed operational plans. Awks.

🫀 Transplanted hearts take on the biological age of their new owner [Nature]: Right, nobody tell Bryan Johnson or he might misunderstand and go rogue with a circular saw. A Harvard team grafted hearts between young, middle-aged and old mice and found that their DNA methylation clocks drifted towards the age of the host. Literally, old hearts got biologically younger in young recipients, and young hearts aged faster in old ones. They then looked at 11 human transplants and found the same pattern, and one-year measures like exercise capacity tracked the recipient’s age more closely than the donor’s. Caveats are that it’s a preprint with an n of 11, and a younger methylation age doesn’t undo coronary arteries full of lipid deposits, but this is very interesting.

🧠 The Next Wearable Goes on Your Head: And finally… we’ve had rings, patches and watches, now a pill-shaped device taped to the side of your head tracks “Brain Flow” (a proxy for cerebral blood flow) and an “Entropy” score described outrageously as the body’s real-time cost of being alive. The science rests on a Gravity Ageing Hypothesis, which is the idea that a lifetime of sitting and standing makes the heart work harder to get blood to the brain, and that might feed into ageing. Comparisons against transcranial Doppler look alright, but in small groups of healthy young people, partly (again) in a preprint, with validation still underway.

What to Listen to 🔊

I read a Substack recently about how we’re all documenting our lives like influencers even if we aren’t one, and Everything Is Content highlight that concept, whilst chatting through interesting healthtech topics. Our generation were the first to track everything, and possibly first to get anxious about it. Have you ever woken up feeling fine until your sleep score told you otherwise? How ludicrous that sounds in writing, but the placebo effect is real and thriving, and sold to us for a monthly fee.

Ever wondered who's to blame when the AI your doctor uses gets it wrong? Turns out it's a proper headache to work out. Host Rosalind English and two barristers from 1 Crown Office Row explain why a contract can't just settle it: most of us get our care through the NHS, where there isn't one to fall back on. So all a contract really does is let the companies squabble among themselves over who's at fault. I can already hear Shaggy's It Wasn't Me playing in the background.

This one's even better in hindsight. Prof Alastair Denniston, who chaired the commission, sat down to talk through his recommendations, and two weeks later the government accepted all 44 of them, mostly pencilled in for Spring 2027. My question is whether anything in the 44 covers who's actually building and testing these tools. Since finding out that women were routinely excluded from clinical trials (even when it was CONCERNING THEIR TREATMENT) until the 1990s, I'll be asking this of every new rulebook from now on.

Events 📅

Hash It Out: Uncharted Territory, Entering New Markets
🗓️ Tue 13 Oct, 6–8pm
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
This Tuesday, so clear your diary now. Grindr just paid $250m for a PrEP company whose model wouldn’t work here, which says everything about picking your next market. Come and hear from people who’ve got the passport stamp, and come find me because I’m co-hosting.

BMJ Future Health Europe
🗓️ 29–30 Oct
📍 🇬🇧 The Brewery, London.
This is the one for clinicians who want to build things without quitting the day job, and there’s a whole women in healthcare track I’ll be heading straight for. Every session is CPD certified, so you can call it training (your manager doesn’t need to know about the drinks after).

AI in Health Summit
🗓️ 4 Nov
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
Economist Impact is asking why barely anyone has scaled AI properly, a month after our government said yes to 44 recommendations and pencilled most of them in for spring. Norway’s medical devices regulator is speaking, so someone please ask how long their homework takes.

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

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

⭐ Enterprise Customer Success Manager (NHS), Heim: A superb job if you know how NHS Trusts work, you’ve rolled out software before, and you want your next role to put clinicians back in front of patients. Heim’s tech powers >20,000 hours of NHS community care and cuts nurses’ drive time by 42%. You’d own the biggest NHS relationships and work with everyone from frontline teams to Trust COOs. £55k to £70k plus bonus and equity, 33 days’ holiday (plus your birthday off), London hybrid, and a team of clinicians and technologists who clearly know their stuff. Featured.

Apply

🫧 MHRA AI Airlock, Phase 3: The government said yes to all 44 recommendations we covered earlier, and this is the bit you can actually do something with. It’s the MHRA’s sandbox where AI device makers test their product with the regulator watching, and this round is all about what happens after launch (aka the exact thing the commission wants policed). It’s free to apply, and there’s a webinar for applicants on 22 October at 10am if you want to sniff it out first.

🦘 Partnerships Lead (UK&I), Heidi: They went from $1m to $50m in recurring revenue in two years and just landed US$340m, so the Australians are clearly here to stay. You’d be the one plugging Heidi into the record systems GPs and hospitals already use, so it suits someone who speaks both sales and tech. It’s hybrid, and you get your birthday off, which would work on me. (Heard you loud and clear there, Anna - James)

🐢 Social Media Consultant, TORTUS: The British answer to Heidi, and very much the intentional tortoise in this race (their branding, not mine). They say they were the first ambient voice tool to get UKCA Class IIa, so whoever lands this gets to post about a product with actual evidence behind it, which is rarer in healthtech than it should be. Bonus points if you can make a medical device certificate go viral.

James’ editor notes:

* Yep the wearable penis ring exists, and strap in because a journal called “Traslational Andrology and Urology” expressed the following:

• Wearable penile devices (WPDs) offer real-time data on erectile function, providing critical insights into nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) patterns that can indicate underlying health issues.

• A WPD has potential to advance erectile function monitoring by providing real-time data on NPT and intra-coital activity. It has promise in detecting early dysfunction, assessing cardiovascular risk, and enhancing proactive health management.

• By measuring parameters like firmness, girth expansion, and the frequency of erections, they enable proactive monitoring of erectile health, potentially predicting conditions like erectile dysfunction (ED) and cardiovascular disease earlier than traditional methods.

There you have it. Don’t say we never tackle the hard things in Pigeon.

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

00:00 - Intro
02:58 - AI vs Doctors: The Fight Only the Media is Having
26:39 - Grindr Wants to be Your Doctor Now

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com
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📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hi team. Plenty of good news this week….

The best news is that we’re hiring at SomX. If you’re very junior or very senior and looking for a role in healthtech comms, marketing, media or creator management, get in touch 🙏

In other news, the trend I’m noticing is a booming consumer health sector and hugely blurred lines of where healthcare systems start. I haven’t included it below because I’ve literally just seen it as I’m hitting publish but even Grindr just acquired a HIV prevention telehealth company. People are being met by access to healthcare where they are (i.e. in apps they use every day) and this is a really important element towards the success of preventative healthcare. Price isn’t the only barrier at all.

I remember watching a panel at HLTH a couple of years ago that were talking about the community wanting LGBTQ+ specific systems and pathways to emerge due to specificities and nuance in their care that the most experienced clinicians treating them understood. On the face of it, this looks like progress and what modern preventative care could become for more and more communities.

I do think more bridges between the public and private sectors to spread learning would make it easier to support private sector initiatives more broadly.

James

Shameless self-promotion? Absolutely. But if you read this newsletter then (1) you have a sense of humour and (2) you know healthtech. That means you might be ideal for one of our open roles:

• Account Director

• Account Executive

Whichever role you go for, you'd work across strategy, content/social, PR, events, media production and creator management for our healthtech, biotech and pharma clients. If you’re creative, understand science and tech, and/or you can keep a client calm at 6pm on a Friday, we'd love to hear from you. And if you found out about the role from Pigeon, let us know in your application.

Apply for a role

News Bites 🥪

💊 OpenEvidence raises $250M at $15B valuation: I remember writing something similar last time OpenEvidence came up in Pigeon, but if you want to feel seriously unproductive or like a really subpar founder, just know they’ve added about £300m of valuation every few weeks since founding in 2022. It’s an AI search tool that answers clinical questions using NEJM, JAMA and the guidelines, more than half of US physicians use it regularly, and it sits inside Epic at Mount Sinai and Sutter Health. It’s free for doctors and funded by pharma advertising. Sometimes it really doesn’t need to be complicated.

💍 Oura cancels their IPO due to ‘uncertainty in the market’: Last week we said the IPO was on, aaaand now it’s off. On paper, Oura was an ideal listing. Profitable, heading for 5.7 million paid members and 90% revenue growth this year (its own figures). Then literally one day before it was due to hit Nasdaq at a whopping $15.6bn valuation, it pulled the IPO because of a jittery market. What does that really mean? Well, 73% of the shares you’d be able to buy as a member of the public were from existing holders cashing out big, and loads of money was earmarked for tax. And when it looks like people won’t get as rich as they’d like, turns out they’re willing to jilt. For legal reasons, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.

🚨 Martha’s Rule Goes to Every A&E (So Who Answers the Phone?): Martha Mills was 13 when she came off her bike in 2021 and suffered a pancreatic injury. She was admitted to King's, developed sepsis and died, after her parents repeatedly raised concerns that went unheard. The coroner said she probably would’ve survived if she'd been moved to intensive care sooner. Martha's Rule gives patients, families and staff a 24/7 phone number to an urgent review by a separate critical care team, and it's now live on 221 acute sites. NHS England is extending it to every A&E and waiting room by March 2028, after pilots in 7 trusts produced 69 calls, some of which ended in emergency surgery or an ICU transfer. Innovation comes in many forms.

💷 The NHS Is Leaving £33bn a Year (and 20,600 Lives) on the Table: Most of this we do already know, but it’s validating to see it in one place. The Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission reckons a national data strategy, a single patient record, systems that actually talk to each other, protected staff time to implement change, and switching off legacy kit instead of piling new tools on top could save £33bn a year by 2040 and prevent up to 20,600 deaths a year.

🫀 UltraSight Raises $24M for Cardiac AI Ultrasound: Imagine real-time computer vision that guides ITU nurses and A&E staff into capturing diagnostic-grade images. It exists and it’s just raised $24m in a Series B2 (we’re adding numbers now apparently) from Mayo Clinic Ventures among others. Sceptical? Me too, but a JAMA Cardiology study found novices using the system got images good enough for automated detection of moderate-or-worse aortic stenosis, with 93% sensitivity and 96% specificity. It's FDA 510(k) cleared, live at 10+ sites, and they’re expanding into ICU, VAD and ECMO workflows. Not sure whose neck is on the line when there’s a missed tamponade, but sounds cool.

🧬 One CRISPR Shot, a Year of Halved Cholesterol: I see your statin and I raise you a genetically edited liver from a one-shot CRISPR therapy that halves your cholesterol for a year. This thing called CTX310 switched off another thing called ANGPTL3 in the liver and it cut LDL by 52.5% and triglycerides by 47.8% at 12 months, with no serious treatment-related adverse events. It’s 15 patients, and yes, the trial is sponsor-funded, but those results are hardly on the fence. The permanent edit comes with 15 years of FDA-mandated follow-up which is an interesting (appropriate) quirk.

🤖 The FDA Writes the Rulebook for Surgical Robots: If you want to build a healthtech robot and bring it to market sometime soon (who the hell doesn’t), now there’s a guide from the FDA that covers everything from clinical data and human factors to cybersecurity, interoperability and reprocessing. I feel like they could’ve made this way cooler, very easily, but, dry as it is, it does prevent a few of the more dramatic apocalyptic doomsday scenarios. e.g. Manufacturers have to actually show what happens when you need an emergency stop mid-procedure. Could’ve easily been in a very readable chapter called “Kill Switch” but apparently the FDA’s more interested in accuracy and safety than hype and marketing. Nerds.

And finally…

🚀 Why Outer Space Makes You Constipated: Houston, we have a poopy problem. Metabolomics (what a word) on blood from 52 ISS astronauts (NASA, published in Nature) found that gut bacteria switch to fermenting protein after launch and do so until landing, which fits with slower transit in microgravity. A ludicrously expensive laxative study and the takeaway is basically “more fibre.” The authors say the value is the analogue with bedbound patients, which will surprise absolutely nobody who’s been on a ward for more than 60 seconds. Next up… blasting an F1 into orbit and seeing if they get stressed when all the alarms go off at once.

What to Listen to 🔊

The process of feeling pain has always fascinated me, ever since I learned how to divert the feeling of my eyebrow hairs being ripped out from my face to my hands and feet (by gripping the chair arms and almost breaking my toes from clenching). Amy Baxter explains how pain gets from your body to your brain, and how to cut the signal off without reaching for opioids. So interesting, and could help you out with something seriously chronic, or vain pain like mine.

AI in healthcare seems to be a near constant debate. It can be good, okay, and bad all in the same breath. This pod begins with the classic ‘AI wiping out humanity’ fear to lure you in, and then examines how worried we should be as the robots continue to penetrate our healthcare systems. The National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare, which advises the MHRA, has just called AI one of the biggest opportunities to improve healthcare in a generation. But, it IS two people who sat on the commission essentially reviewing their own homework, so take it with a pinch of salt. I personally worry more about a Matrix-esque AI takeover than the healthcare debacle, but maybe I just watched the film too recently.

James sat down with the MD of healthtech and biotech investment company Tenmile, Steve Burnell, and drilled into how his background in marine ecology and putting satellite trackers on whales, led to where he is today. I love an investor who admits a miss, and Steve talks about one in detail… have a listen for the whole story.

Events 📅

HTN Health Tech Awards 2026
🗓️ 7 October
📍 💻 Online
An awards ceremony you can watch from your desk at lunchtime, cheering on the NHS teams actually shipping things. I’ll be keeping an eye on the digital inclusion and health inequalities category, because that’s the one I’d hand the trophy to first.

Women’s Health Week Europe 2026
🗓️ 7-8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London
Women’s health at a football stadium feels right for a sector that keeps being told it’s finally having a moment. I’m most curious about the wearables session, given Oura couldn’t make it onto the stock market this week. Tickets are £499, so this one’s probably one to expense.

Hash It Out: Uncharted territory - Entering new markets
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London
Every founder hits this question eventually: what happens when you try to sell somewhere new? Good timing, in a week when OpenEvidence decided drug development was its new market. I’ll be there (obviously, its at Hale House), so come and say hi.

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

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🩸 Integrated Marketing Manager (12 Month Contract), Flo Health (London). The app that’s been tracking mine (and my friends’) periods almost since we started them, is now looking for someone to bring that same trust right with us through to our 40s. Flo wants someone on its Brand team to make perimenopause the next thing it owns, a condition that GPs often misdiagnose or miss altogether. Finally a hot flush mention that my mum will be happy about.

💬 Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Accurx (London). After this week's EMMA saga, it's clear the phone robots aren't quite ready. Accurx does triage online instead, it's already in 98% of GP practices, and this is the job building the brain behind it. Add an in-house chef and a dog-friendly office, and I'd be surprised if applications aren't already flooding in.

🎓 Professional Education Trainer, CMR Surgical (Cambridge). Does designing the training that teaches surgical teams to set up and run a surgical robot sound like the right amount of Black Mirror for your liking? If so, and you’ve got the theatre experience to back it up, CMR wants you designing its training, VR sessions included. Just make sure they know what to do when the robot needs to hand back control (please).

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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.

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com
✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQjiGl53i8dtZ8g3xer2
📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hi team,

James is having a week off, so I’m up, and it’s been a week all about the money, money, money, with Heidi raising $340M, Oura going public, and UK AI call handler InTouchNow announcing its seed round. And Down Under, it turns out an OpenAI agent wandered into the Medicare system back in June, but the government only just found out. Oops…

Until next time,

Jessica 🫶🏼

News Bites 🥪

💸 Heidi Health lands $340M at a $900M valuation: Last week, Scandinavian scribe Tandem announced its $100m Series B, so, naturally, this week, the Australian scribe Heidi stood up and said, I raise you a $340M Series C, literally. Just shy of unicorn status, Blackbird led $100m in venture funding, with LocalGlobe’s Phoenix Court, Point72 and Headline following on, plus a further $240m in non-dilutive growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Since GC will be taking a capped slice of revenue rather than equity, it’s an interesting indicator of just how much confidence the funders have in the company. One thing is certain, the ambient scribe race is well and truly on.

🚨 Australia launches urgent review after an OpenAI agent breaches a government health portal: Staying in Australia, an autonomous OpenAI agent got into the statistics portal of Medicare, the country’s universal health insurance scheme. It turns out the breach happened in June. OpenAI found out in August, but the Government only found out in September when OpenAI dropped an email into a general government inbox that only gets checked once a day. Coooolllllll. And comes in the same week Sam Altman called for international AI standards… You’d think a company of that size that is spending a decent whack on public affairs and government relations would have SOMEONE with a direct line to a minister. Alas, a sporadically checked inbox was the channel of preference… makes sense… Anyway, Australia has now launched a review of its AI laws and governance.

🔐 Palantir’s Federated Data Platform takes in GP records for the first time: The FDP saga boils on, and this week it was confirmed that five GP practices in Cheshire and Merseyside now feed pseudonymised data into the FDP through a third party to help the ICB understand and manage the health needs of its patient population, which an internal NHS note called “a significant milestone”, and in principle maybe that’s right. However, back in 2023 ministers told Parliament that GP data would not form part of the national platform, and yet now in five practices it does, without any discourse about the change in strategy or, critically, on patient consent. Particularly awks when 60,000 people voted with their feet between May and July, choosing to use the national data opt-out to block access to their records. Who knows what the FDP will bring in the next week, but maybe Andy and Yvette are saving the big announcement for Labour Party conference. We can but hope.

☎️ VCs back InTouchNow’s AI voice agents for the NHS: We all know getting through to a GP practice at 8am on a Tuesday morning to book an appointment takes more planning and strategy than securing four tickets for Glastonbury. InTouchNow, an AI call handling company for NHS GP practices, has raised a £2.3M seed round led by Ada Ventures, supported by Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital. But AI bias is real, and voice AI and AI receptionists have understandably come under heat for failing to understand accents and languages. Live in 150+ practices already, InTouchNow is backing itself to fix that with over 200 regional accents and over 80 different languages that are automatically detected when someone starts speaking; if they can solve it, Drake won’t be the only one with hotline bling.

💍 Oura launches its IPO, seeking up to $2.2bn on Nasdaq: The rumours were true and Oura is heading to Nasdaq, with 50 million shares priced at $40 to $44 for a raise of up to $2.2bn. Existing shareholders are selling 36.5 million of those shares, so only the remaining 13.5 million new shares raise money for the company, about $533m in total. Of that, $526m goes straight to paying the tax bill on behalf of employees cashing in their shares, which leaves the company with roughly $7m, or about 0.3% of the headline number. Oura does have another 7.5 million shares (around $300m) held back in case demand runs hot, so perhaps that’s what it’s banking on. Either way, Oura has got down on one knee in front of Wall Street, so fingers crossed for them that the market says yes.

🧪 Novo Nordisk partners with Anthropic on AI drug discovery: Five months after getting cosy with OpenAI, Novo Nordisk has decided it’s in the market for an LLM-thruple, and invited Anthropic into the relationship. It will test Claude Science across its R&D workflows and use Anthropic’s models for internal software development, and suddenly two platforms with two very different use cases start to make sense. Plenty of others in pharma have moved out of the talking phase to partner up too, with Merck committing up to $1bn to Google Cloud and Eli Lilly collabing with Nvidia for a drug discovery lab. The numbers behind these relationships are pretty chunky, but the jury is still out on how much R&D money they actually save. I guess we’ll keep watching to see which of these couples (or thruples) are still together by the time a drug actually reaches Phase III.

🎗️ Young Lives vs Cancer partners with Ditto to help parents of children with cancer: The world is going wild for clinical scribes, which is potentially great for healthcare professionals, but what about patients? Ditto has built the patient answer to ambient scribing with its free app for patients and their families to help capture and share the conversation and information from consultations with wider family and friends, to alleviate the burden of answering multiple well-meaning questions every day, and to provide them with their own record of the care journey. I hope and pray I never have to use the app under these circumstances, but as a parent of a ‘lively’ almost-two-year-old, I can definitely see the use case for the ad hoc trips to the GP and, dare I say it, Urgent Care. And if you’re interested in finding out what it means to build a truly patient-centred solution, listen back to our chat with Patient Advocacy G.O.A.T. expert Mark Duman on Healthtech Pigeon.

What to Listen to 🔊

Keeping one eye on the Novo / Anthropic / OpenAI thruple, this pod from TED Health explains why Alzheimer’s and cancer stay stubbornly unsolved while compute keeps getting better.

Over on The Healthtech Podcast, James spoke to We Don’t Consult’s Ross Drynan, who explains why clinical founders tend to fail at selling rather than building, why we ought to lean into vibe coding for cheap validation and argues you should sell with a diagnostic rather than a demo 👀

Events 📅

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL London.
The big one for UK digital health, two days of NHS trusts, vendors and policy folk all in one hall. If you only make it to one healthtech show this autumn, this is probably still the one, and after this week’s MHRA report expect every stand to have “AI governance” bolted onto its pitch.

Women’s Health Week Europe 2026
🗓️ 7-8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London.
Given the week we’ve just had, with Evvy, Lilly and a wave of women’s health cash all landing in the same seven days, this one couldn’t be better timed. Two days dedicated entirely to a sector that keeps getting told it’s “finally having a moment.”

HTN Health Tech Awards 2026
🗓️ 7 October
📍 💻 Online.
UK digital health’s own awards night, celebrating the trusts and vendors actually shipping things rather than just talking about them.

Hash It Out: Uncharted territory - Entering new markets
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
The latest Hash It Out session at Hale House brings together innovators and experts to explore how to figure out which new market to head to next.

TechBio UK 2026
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
A day on the collision of biology and technology, aimed at founders and investors betting that AI genuinely changes how drugs and diagnostics get built.

Transforming the NHS 2026
🗓️ 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 One Great George Street, London.
The MHRA just handed the sector 44 new things to think about, so a conference specifically about transforming the NHS has never felt more on the nose. Expect a lot of panels quietly rewriting their slides this week.

Frontiers Health 2026
🗓️ 20-21 October
📍 🇩🇪 Berlin.
Europe’s big digital health innovation gathering, mixing pharma, payers and start-ups in a way that’s more useful than it sounds.

BMJ Future Health Europe 2026
🗓️ 29-30 October
📍 🇬🇧 The Brewery, London.
The BMJ’s own take on where health tech is heading, heavier on evidence and policy than most vendor-run conferences.

AI in Health Summit 2026
🗓️ 4 November
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
A day entirely on AI in healthcare, which after this week should have plenty to talk about.

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

Opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

🚀 Forward Faster Accelerator, Cohort 2 FFinc is looking for 100 female-founded UK businesses for a six-month programme running October to April. Apply so they can find you! Deadline extended to 2 October.

🦘Finance Manager, Heidi (London). A good time to join Heidi if you fancy looking after $340m of new investment. They’re predictably hiring across the board, so if finance isn’t your thing but Heidi is, there’s a good chance they’re recruiting for a role that's up your street.

🩻 GPs, Nurses and HCAs, Neko Health (London). NYC has launched, and UK bases keep expanding so the Neko team are looking for clinicians to help run their preventive scans and keep the wheels well oiled.

📣 Want something in front of our 8,000+ readers?

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Feature a job, podcast, event

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

See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼

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

Hey everyone, a bit of everything this week. Tandem’s got some firepower ($100M) in the scribe race, $40M for Evvy working on the vaginal microbiome and Apple’s bought some cool new magnetic field sensor (likely for a new wearable).

Enjoy.

James.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Tandem raises $100M Series B, Europe writes a cheque: Every so often, us Europeans (yep, Pigeon still identifies as European) get tired of watching American AI companies eat our lunch, so we do things like whack $100m into Tandem Health from our €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund. Tandem’s currently across 14 European markets and about 10,000 care organisations. Biggest market is the UK, where NHS clinicians are already leaning on it daily and the Accurx partnership has a lot to do with that. CEO Lukas Saari says the point is to set European standards rather than import American ones. You can expect to see a lot of similar sovereignty messages start creeping into healthtech company messaging as realisation sets in that one day (maybe quite soon) the US could flick a few switches and turn off a lot of our healthcare infrastructure.

🦠 Evvy’s Vaginal Microbiome Platform Banks a $40M Series B: An oversubscribed $40m Series B into the world’s largest clinical-grade vaginal microbiome dataset. Evvy’s at-home test already serves 100,000+ patients and 3,000 practitioners, cuts bacterial vaginosis recurrence by around half, and reaches a diagnosis in over 90% of symptomatic patients. Next stop? Fertility, preterm birth, cervical cancer, endometriosis and PCOS, in that order. Founder Priyanka Jain summed it up… “Women hear ‘unexplained’ constantly. It really just means medicine wasn’t built to measure female biology.”

🧲 Apple Bought a Nerve-Magnetic-Field-Reading Chip. Cool cool cool: In dystopia weekly, Apple’s picked up the assets of Sonera, a Berkeley spinout. Price undisclosed, obviously and we only know about it because of a Digital Markets Act disclosure to the European Commission. Hmm... Cool tech though. Sonera's S1 chip reads the magnetic fields thrown off by nerve and muscle activity without touching skin, so in a world where every consumer wearable sensor currently needs skin contact, a chip that picks up neuromuscular signal through air is LEVELS above (if it works). And a bit sci fi, which is cool. Apple plainly does not want to be asked what it's for yet. 👀

🧘 The Mental Health Bubble Just Got Priced, and It's 1/10: Bit of an odd one. You probably heard that Sword Health is buying Headspace, all cash (reported at up to $300m), closing in Q4. In the context of Headspace and Ginger merging in 2021 at a $3bn valuation, it all feels weird. Seems that consumer subscription meditation and employer-funded coaching coming together didn’t work. Anyway, a musculoskeletal company now owns the world's best known mindfulness brand, so what’s clearly becoming valuable is the care delivery layer. Virgílio Bento says Sword is "pioneering a new model of mental health care that understands each person, remembers their history, and anticipates their needs, 24/7.” Is that new? They’re on one of the many roads leading to Rome.

🏃‍♀️ Cycle-Syncing Your Workouts. But is there evidence?
Google searches for “cycle-syncing” are up 740% since 2022 and there are now 55,000+ TikTok videos telling women exactly which workout to do on which day of their cycle. According to Leeds Beckett researcher Kelly McNulty, it’s “a trend based on marketing rather than any kind of research or evidence.” As menstrual cycles vary wildly between women and cycle to cycle, a one-size-fits-all phase plan could have very real costs. Dr Faye Bate warns that telling women they’re inherently weaker at certain points in their cycle risks a nocebo effect, and Kelly mentions that routinely easing off strength training could work against women’s long-term bone health. Current advice from experts is to track your own patterns and stay “cycle-aware.”

💡 Your Charging LED Might Be Remodelling Your Heart: This is a very bizarre one but I’m including it to show that when it comes to technology, there’s a lot we don’t know and you need to have an open mind to make sense of the world. 11,071 UK Biobank participants wore wrist light sensors for a week, had cardiac MRIs roughly three years later and if you were exposed to 3 lux (a bit of light) overnight, you had heavier left ventricles, thicker walls, smaller chamber volumes and worse flexing on both sides. Slept in near darkness? None of that. And to be clear, 3 lux is not a bright room. We’re talking about a streetlight through thin curtains, a charger LED, the lit up number on an aircon unit - that kind of thing. Correlation or causation? That’s the question. Shift work (sleeping in the day), deprivation, living somewhere bright, all that’s on the table for an explanation… More work needed.

🩸 400,000 Reddit Posts Found Rogue Ozempic Side Effects: This is why the LLMs trawl Reddit… a (health) information goldmine. A Penn Engineering team ran five years of posts from nearly 70,000 users and mapped them onto MedDRA terms. 44% described at least one side effect, and nearly 4% of those reported menstrual irregularities including intermenstrual and heavy bleeding, with chills, hot flushes and fatigue also over-represented against trial reporting. Raises questions about modern pharmacovigilance and what a genuine upgrade might look like.\

And finally…

🐭 Ozempic for Mice, Who Now Refuse to Die: Longevity bros are about to get really excited. Semaglutide given to old, healthy mice extended lifespan while improving memory, muscle function, glucose control and a spread of ageing biomarkers and ffects reportedly went beyond calorie restriction. That means the mechanism might not be weight loss and might be something far more exciting. But just in case you’re about to have a decision failure and attempt something weird…

THIS IS IN MICE. YOU’RE NOT A MOUSE.

This fortnight’s Pigeon Insider edition asks “Will the NHS Waste the AI Moment?”

It comes out of the last SomX event with Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt MP. Everyone in the room agreed AI is the moment, but we didn’t agree on who pays, who carries the risk, or what happens when the pilot funding runs out. Hunt was very candid about what he'd do differently…

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What to listen to 🔊

Loved this chat with healthtech OG, Nader Alaghband of Ampersand Health. We chatted about how clinicians and healthtech companies can and should build for patients, what they care about and specifically why Crohn's and colitis patients measure their own wellbeing by whether they can hold down a job and see their family, not by inflammation markers. Good stuff in here about what that means for how the NHS adopts new tools.

Moderna and Merck's mRNA cancer vaccine breakthrough, then a proper sceptical takedown of wearables overclaiming clinical accuracy. "A ring cannot measure EEG," which is basically Pigeon's personality in a sentence.

MHRA chief Lawrence Tallon and Professor Henrietta Hughes go deeper on the recent 44-recommendation report, including a proper look at ambient voice tech in pharmacy.

A harrowing account of how a UTI turned into sepsis and quadruple amputation, and a sharp reminder that "women's health" isn't only hormones and cycles, a lot of the time it's being taken seriously, fast enough.

Events 📅

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
📍 🇬🇧 Birmingham.
A week-long showcase of UK life sciences and medtech, from early-stage research through to scaled-up manufacturing. Useful if you want the bigger picture beyond just software.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL London.
The big one for UK digital health, two days of NHS trusts, vendors and policy folk all in one hall. If you only make it to one healthtech show this autumn, this is probably still the one, and after this week’s MHRA report expect every stand to have “AI governance” bolted onto its pitch.

Women’s Health Week Europe 2026
🗓️ 7-8 October
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London.
Given the week we’ve just had, with Evvy, Lilly and a wave of women’s health cash all landing in the same seven days, this one couldn’t be better timed. Two days dedicated entirely to a sector that keeps getting told it’s “finally having a moment.”

HTN Health Tech Awards 2026
🗓️ 7 October
📍 💻 Online.
UK digital health’s own awards night, celebrating the trusts and vendors actually shipping things rather than just talking about them.

TechBio UK 2026
🗓️ 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
A day on the collision of biology and technology, aimed at founders and investors betting that AI genuinely changes how drugs and diagnostics get built.

Transforming the NHS 2026
🗓️ 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 One Great George Street, London.
The MHRA just handed the sector 44 new things to think about, so a conference specifically about transforming the NHS has never felt more on the nose. Expect a lot of panels quietly rewriting their slides this week.

Frontiers Health 2026
🗓️ 20-21 October
📍 🇩🇪 Berlin.
Europe’s big digital health innovation gathering, mixing pharma, payers and start-ups in a way that’s more useful than it sounds.

BMJ Future Health Europe 2026
🗓️ 29-30 October
📍 🇬🇧 The Brewery, London.
The BMJ’s own take on where health tech is heading, heavier on evidence and policy than most vendor-run conferences.

AI in Health Summit 2026
🗓️ 4 November
📍 🇬🇧 Royal College of Physicians, London.
A day entirely on AI in healthcare, which after this week should have plenty to talk about.

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

Opportunities 💰

🤖 Senior AI/ML Engineer, Flo Health: Flo’s in front of 80 million monthly users, so your decisions shape the AI behind cycle predictions and health notifications for women all over the world.

🩺 Global Clinic Operations Lead, Neko Health: Own the pipes between company and a clinical workforce scaling fast in multiple countries. Change management nous essential, healthcare background preferred.

📊 Head of Data Engineering, Numan: Numan bundles diagnostics, meds, supplements and doctor consults into one consumer health platform. Lead a team of 2 and own the pipelines, data models, quality monitoring and access controls.

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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.

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

00:00 - Intro
02:58 - Time's Top 500 Healthtech Companies & Headspace's $300m Sale to Sword Health
16:37 - Menstrual Fitness: Why Some Women Are Cycle Syncing Their Workouts
30:27 - FDA Hearing Weighs Access and Safety for Psychedelic Medicine
39:50 - Outro

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com
✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQj..
📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Hey everyone, coming to you slightly late as I’ve just flown in, so hope you spot the deliberate mistakes and typos.

Anyway, this week, the MHRA’s dealt the sector a nice new AI framework, which people seem to like. We’re critiquing AI in places, we’re celebrating it, researching it, deploying it in other places…

You’re living through the AI revolution in healthtech and if you’re reading this you have a front row seat.

What a time to be alive.

James

News Bites 🥪

🇬🇧 National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare: Loads of people talking about this online and here’s what you need to know… The big shift is the one-off regulatory approval moving to whole-lifecycle. That means a device gets released to the market under supervision, then earns full authorisation by behaving in the real world. Hugh Harvey, who sat on the technology working group, calls it a learner plate system, which is bang on. Many will say it’s overdue and I’ve spoken to people on the podcast who have said similar. A single-timepoint assessment tells you basically nothing about a model that drifts as soon as meets a population it wasn’t trained on. And there are finally some teeth… fines for non-compliant manufacturers, plus a recommendation to build a public naughty list and make adverse event data searchable.

🎙️ AI scribes fail to capture patients’ experiences: Edinburgh University’s team went through 27 papers and found that they transcribe speech beautifully but not facial expression, hesitation… no “patient-says-fine-but-clearly-isn’t.” When you think about it, it’s obvious, they privilege clinical data over the story, which means it’s up to the clinician to still add those parts. Also, patients clam up on the sensitive stuff once they know they’re being recorded, and clinicians are starting to not recognise their own notes. Meanwhile, Digital Health and Care Wales opened a £10m AVT framework on 2 September, and HSSIB’s investigation into AVT harm in hospitals doesn’t report until summer 2027. Procurement is moving faster than the evidence and faster than the safety machinery.

💷 First procurement competitions launch for £100m sovereign AI scheme: Aiming to support British AI companies to “start here, scale here and win globally”. DHSC owns challenge 4, which is AI for a more productive NHS. It covers workflow automation, care coordination and decision support. Contracts run £250k to £10m, most expected at £1m to £3m. Interestingly, it’s open to UK-registered startups and SMEs with no minimum turnover and no trading history, provided at least half the contract value goes on R&D services. This is the sovereign bit… the state’s decided to support British AI startups that have never sold anything before

defaulting to a US incumbent. Batch one closes 1 October with an outcome by 31 October, which gives DHSC four weeks to assess a pile of AI proposals. If you’re submitting, get a move on.

🧠 Sam Altman's mind-reading startup has gone shopping for ultrasound chips: Ok deep breath to get through AI dystopia weekly. I’ll explain what’s going on. Brain-computer interfaces read activity out of your brain and turn it into something a computer can use. The one everyone knows is Neuralink, which is hair-thin electrodes in the cortex, you get a superb signal, but neurosurgeon required. Merge Labs, Sam Altman's $252m neurotech outfit, is betting on reading the brain from outside using ultrasound instead, which is why it’s just licensed Butterfly Network's Poseidon chips, the same ultrasound-on-a-semiconductor kit behind their phone-sized ultrasound probe. Functional ultrasound doesn't see neurons fire, it sees how blood flow shifts towards whichever bit of brain is working, so you trade a lot of resolution for not having a hole drilled in your head, which, let’s be honest, is preferable. The catch is that your skull scatters ultrasound pretty badly, so a way to go yet, but it’s all pretty interesting.

🫀 Come for the mammogram, stay for the cardiovascular assessment: Given the scale of cardiovascular disease in women, we're still rubbish at picking it up early. Researchers at Sheba Medical Center trained a deep learning model on 97,364 mammograms from nearly 30,000 women and got it spotting hypertension, ischaemic heart disease and stroke risk from images taken for an entirely different purpose. AUCs of 0.79, 0.78 and 0.86 respectively, which is decent (but not diagnostic and the team did say so themselves). The appeal for this is pretty obvious, though. Mammography screening already pulls millions of women through the door at an age when cardiovascular risk might be starting to compound. It’s a free signal from an image we’re taking anyway and if we get the right system in place here, it could be a very positive.

🩺 Ipremom raises €15m seed for a blood test that flags pregnancy complications in the first trimester: Valencia’s iPremom has taken €15m in seed from Amadeus Capital Partners, Asabys and APEX to read cell-free RNA in maternal blood to flag markers of decidualisation resistance at 9 to 14 weeks, which is months ahead of symptoms. It’s built off the PREMOM study’s 26,000 samples across 10,000 pregnancies, i.e. a serious dataset for a seed round. Clinical validation’s still to come.

And finally…

🚽 Buried underpants and a new definition of kissing win 2026 Ig Nobel prizes: The 2026 Ig Nobels landed in Zurich last week, and the one to care about is physics, which went to two urinal geometries, Cornucopia and Nautilus, that cut splashback to 1.4 per cent of a conventional commercial urinal by holding the stream impingement angle at or below a critical 30 degrees. Real fluid dynamics, peer reviewed in PNAS Nexus, and it comes with a number: America’s roughly 56 million non-residential urinals splash more than 350,000 litres of urine onto floors every single day. Underneath the giggling there’s a serious infection control point about hospital floors that nobody funds, and a considerably less serious one about the state of the average gents.*** Innovation comes in many forms, people.

This fortnight’s Pigeon Insider edition asks “Will the NHS Waste the AI Moment?”

It comes out of the last SomX event with Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt MP. Everyone in the room agreed AI is the moment, but we didn’t agree on who pays, who carries the risk, or what happens when the pilot funding runs out. Hunt was very candid about what he'd do differently…

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What to listen to 🔊

Dr Nikita Kanani, Global Medical Director at Neko Health and still a practising GP, joins me to talk about what three years of Neko’s outcome data actually shows, and whether prevention at scale survives contact with the NHS. Recorded in person, which is always makes for a better one! Video on Spotify and Youtube.

Laura Earnshaw, founder of myHappyMind and ex Global Head of Talent at AstraZeneca, on teaching resilience to children as young as three. Possibly the most on-brand career pivot in healthtech.

Tara Humphrey and Dan Burton get into sleep, movement, consistency and the lifespan versus healthspan argument as applied to the people running the NHS. Healthcare professionals telling other healthcare professionals to move more: the "do as I say, not as my rota allows" of wellness advice.

Lucy Procter, elite HYROX athlete, spent years being told her PMDD symptoms were laziness. She talks late ADHD and autism diagnosis, masking, and how PMDD affected training and recovery at competition level.

Events 📅

Longevity Investors Conference 2026
🗓️ 14-17 September
📍 🇨🇭 Gstaad.
Family offices, funds and private investors in a ski resort, talking rejuvenation science with the people doing it. Heavy on capital, occasionally light on endpoints, but the money moving into longevity is real and worth watching.

Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House
📅 15 September
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
MHIN’s showcase returns to the Harley Street Health District for a full day (noon to 9pm, so pace yourself) of mental health innovation. Given how much of this space still runs on vibes rather than evidence, worth your time.

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
📍 🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL, London.
Three thousand-odd NHS digital and clinical leaders, 150 suppliers and five CPD streams under one roof at ExCeL. If you want to know what trusts are actually buying rather than what vendors wish they were buying, this is the one.

Harley Street Health District Conference 2026
📅 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
A full-day conference from the district becoming one of London’s biggest healthtech hubs.

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

Opportunities 💰

🎨 Product Designer (Staff/Principal) - Anima, London, hybrid: Anima are automating referrals, prescriptions and care coordination to leave GPs free for the human bits. The NHS-side answer to the AI-fights-admin trend above.

🩻 Clinical Operations Specialist - Scan.com, US, hybrid: Scan.com runs America’s national imaging network, managing the whole pathway end to end rather than bolting bits together. This role is the human quality check, so matching reports to appointments, chasing radiology groups on priorities, keeping records straight.

🔧 Senior Medical Device Quality & Regulatory Engineer - Flow Neuroscience, Malmö/London, hybrid: The FDA-approved at-home depression headset needs more brainpower. Literally, it’s a brain stimulation device. Join as they scale from 55,000 EU/UK patients into the US.

📣 Want something in front of our 8,000+ 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.

00:00 - Intro
04:04 - Wearables Recap
13:33 - AI Scribes May Fail to Capture Patients' Experiences
32:52 - IPremom Raise 15M to Help Pregnancy Care

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com
✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQj...
📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

In 2012, a few months into the Health Secretary job and with no background in health whatsoever, Jeremy Hunt started doing half-day shifts at Watford General, washing beds between patients in A&E.

At the latest SomX Healthtech Talks event, he talked about a ninety-year-old lady with dementia, brought in unconscious from a care home after falling. Surprising to him was that nobody knew a thing about her. Not her history, not her medications, not her allergies. And they were about to start giving her drugs.

“Because she had dementia, even if she woke up, she wouldn’t have been able to tell them.”

At that point, there was just one hospital in England where A&E staff could read a GP’s digital record. The promise of a paperless NHS by 2018 followed, which is what I reminded him of at the top of the event. Maybe unkindly, but hey, a front-bench Tory MP’s faced way worse than me and I knew he’d have an answer for why he didn’t achieve it.

It’s not as if he wasn’t close. Fourteen years on, and every GP record in the country is electronic. Every A&E can pull a summary care record. Forty-two million NHS App accounts have been registered. The specific problem Hunt walked into in Watford is, broadly, solved.

But look at what hasn’t been solved… If that woman came through the doors tonight, there’s a world where an AI model could read her whole record, flag her interactions and propose a plan before the registrar had finished washing their hands. But it wouldn’t be permitted to act on any of it without a human signing underneath. Not because it can’t (arguably). But in part, because we haven’t decided who’s liable when it's wrong.

Is the human in the loop a scapegoat?

Picture what the human in the loop actually is. It’s not a committee, it’s a registrar at 2am, holding 14 patients in their head, looking what an AI has outputted and clicking something to make a decision.

The first is clinical. Someone trained looks at the output and decides whether it makes sense for this patient, tonight. That is the job everyone assumes is happening. Fine.

The second is legal. The click puts a name on the decision. It routes the consequence to a person who has an employer, a regulator, a defence organisation and a professional registration to lose. It turns a risk nobody can assign into one that lands somewhere specific.

What sucks for that registrar is that the second job is being done reliably and the first one is not at all.

“The reason that there’s a human in the loop at every decision is because the risk sits with the clinician in the hospital.”

Jack Needham, Founder of Sanctuary Health was right when he said this. The clinician is in the loop because the clinician is the only component of the system anyone has worked out how to insure.

Hunt, earlier in the evening, quoted someone telling him that every surgeon carries a private graveyard in their head, the patients they lost and still turn over. That’s grief. It’s also, coldly, a functioning liability mechanism. Behind it sits a century of case law, a claims process, an indemnity market and someone who can be sued. An algorithm has no graveyard, and nobody standing behind it.

Algorithmic autonomy

So… if you can solve the underwriting, does algorithmic autonomy follow?

Read more

Hello healthtechies,

A tale of two halves this week. The two halves being:

• AI bad, naughty AI 👎🏼

• AI good, excellent AI 👍🏼

We’re trending upwards with it, but it’s not without its scandals.

This week's edition of Healthtech Pigeon is powered by our friends at Sanctuary Health, who are on a mission to make AI actually useful in healthcare. Rather than parachuting in a shiny model and hoping for the best, Sanctuary actually embeds engineers directly inside hospitals, insurers and government teams to build tools that fit real clinical workflows.

Fun fact, Jack, the founder, was the one on stage at this week’s SomX Healthtech Talks event so he’s supporting healthtech left right and centre at the minute.

Learn more

News Bites 🥪

📝 Doctors’ AI scribes get names of drugs and diagnoses wrong: This is not ok. Someone spent a decent stretch of her life believing she had nerve damage that could lead to MS. She caught it herself, because she happens to work in the NHS, but Healthwatch England has pulled together a load of examples… a drug swapped for a similar-sounding one, a consultant's instruction to get a repeat migraine prescription just vanishing from the letter. In every case the patient spotted it. Hm… clinician-in-the-loop? There are at least 27 different scribes running across the NHS in England and the MHRA has decided they aren't medical devices. Make it make sense.

⚖️ Statistics watchdog says NHS England breached the code over AI triage claim: Another whoopsie. The Office for Statistics Regulation has found NHS England promoted a 29% fall in GP telephone queue volumes from a Sussex AI triage pilot without publishing the underlying data, the figure came from an unpublished internal evaluation, and the preprint on the pilot doesn’t even analyse phone queues. “We have found that NHS England’s statement about the GP practice trial did not meet our expectations under the Code of Practice’s Standards for the Public Use of Statistics, Data and Wider Analysis.” Oops.

🤰 Oxford-based PeriPear has raised £1.2m for birth injuries: In much more positive news, PeriPear is solving for the 90% of first-time mothers that tear during vaginal birth with a wearable device that delivers automated perineal thermotherapy during childbirth, so that’s hands-free warmth designed to help prevent perineal tearing. Co-founded by former NHS midwife Nina van Schaick, who spent 14 years watching the problem up close, and healthtech founder Eviatar Natan. The round was led by HERmesa with more than 50 female investors behind it.

🩺 ChatGPT is now sitting inside your Epic record: In AI dystopia weekly, OpenAI’s now plugged ChatGPT Health into Epic, so that’s one less place to escape it. I joke. I’m all for tech, but I think I’m a little but concerned about the power being accumulated. Anyhoo… clinicians can pull in notes, labs, meds and specialist letters and interrogate them in natural language. It can do pre-visit reviews and build clinical timelines but read-only, they're keen to stress. OpenAI ran 4,300 physician responses across 27 use cases and reports 99.1% were safe. Hm… what’s 0.9% of every interaction in a health system that size? A big number I imagine. Meanwhile they’re obviously fighting lawsuits over near-fatal recommendations, and still says ChatGPT isn't for diagnosis or treatment. Fun times.

💰 Scan.com pulls in $220m to scale its diagnostic imaging API: UK-founded Scan.com has done a $90m Series C with a $130m of debt to grow its API and marketplace for booking outpatient scans. Apparently 900,000+ patients served and $165m of ARR (company’s own numbers). They want to API into independent imaging centres’ systems so employers, health plans and digital health apps can see live scanner availability, upfront pricing and subspecialty fit, then route the report to the right radiologist with results back in 48 hours. In the US, obviously.

🔬 MHRA opens a live NHS testing sandbox with Manchester for AI devices and wearables: Yep. AI-enabled devices, risk stratification tools, wearables and ambient voice tech are getting deployed in real clinical settings and generate evidence as they go, rather than relying on retrospective validation sets. Ideal. First technologies land very soon, with a roundtable and an expressions-of-interest window to follow later in 2026. Every CCIO wants to know if it actually works after the demo. Now they can find out. Do we think the evidence that comes out is portable beyond Manchester? Or would that make too much sense?

🥽 Someone finally found a use for the Apple Vision Pro, and it's inside your hip: The world's most expensive way to watch YouTube has just been strapped on for a hip arthroscopy at Duke Health. Stryker's SportSuite Vision (the result of a focus group titled “what do we call it so orthopaedic surgeons want to use it”) picked up FDA De Novo authorisation in July, making it the first app cleared for actual intraoperative use with the Vision Pro. It pulls arthroscopic video, CT imaging, HipCheck and HipMap into one field of view instead of the usual scatter of monitors around theatre. Impress your friends and/or sound insufferable by asking people if they’re a fan of “spatial surgery.”

👂 Clementine raises €1.7 million for AI hearing care agent: Hearing loss affects 1.5 billion people and roughly 80% never seek treatment. Those who do typically spent more than 8 years working up to it. That gap is the common constellation of denial, stigma and admin friction, but not clinical capacity for a change, so it’s an interesting one to throw AI at. Matthew (why not call it Matthew I suppose) is an AI hearing care agent that fields patient questions, educates users, overcomes emotional and practical barriers, and guides them toward appropriate care. Basically, judgement-free, always-on, no waiting list, ends in a solution.

🧱 We've Doubled the Doctors and It Still Feels Worse. Why?: Jack over at Sanctuary Health (was on the panel at the Jeremy Hunt do last night), has, predictably gone bold here. The NHS has gone from 2.5% to 7% of GDP and from one doctor per 5,500 people to one per 324, yet access feels worse, because demand is effectively infinite and rises exponentially with age. Abundance doesn't come from more supply, it comes from the cost of supply collapsing, the way sequencing a genome went from $3bn to under $100 in forty years. Crucially, we forgive the harm of doing nothing yet punish the harm of doing something, so a three week wait that lets a cancer grow is normalised, while an AI that's wrong once in a hundred is a national scandal. Ten minutes reading this is ten minutes well spent.

What to listen to 🔊

Our friends Down Under from What The Health and Tenmile have just launched a podcast, and three episodes in, they’re already exploring what Burning Man and the new era of mental health therapeutics have in common. The ineffable Emily Casey gets the lowdown from Dr. Michael Winlo, Chief Scientific Officer of Emyria, on how we’re finally harnessing psychedelics to treat mental health conditions, the science behind it and what it needs in practice to make it work.

Award-winning investigative journalist Deborah Cohen joined me on the podcast this week. Having recently published her book, Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health, which has already been shortlisted for the Royal Society prize, we covered a lot of ground - from regulatory whack-a-mole and anti-vaxxing to GLP-1s, and of course, my Mastermind topic, The Kardashians

And if you missed us at Hale House for Healthtech Talks this week with Rt. Hon. Sir Jeremy Hunt, Tara Donelly and Jack Needham, I caught up with Jack on the Pigeon podcast for a debrief on our most disagreeable event yet.

Events 📅

Longevity Investors Conference 2026
🗓️ 14-17 September
📍 🇨🇭 Gstaad.
Family offices, funds and private investors in a ski resort, talking rejuvenation science with the people doing it. Heavy on capital, occasionally light on endpoints, but the money moving into longevity is real and worth watching.

Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House
📅 15 September
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
MHIN’s showcase returns to the Harley Street Health District for a full day (noon to 9pm, so pace yourself) of mental health innovation. Given how much of this space still runs on vibes rather than evidence, worth your time.

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
📍 🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL, London.
Three thousand-odd NHS digital and clinical leaders, 150 suppliers and five CPD streams under one roof at ExCeL. If you want to know what trusts are actually buying rather than what vendors wish they were buying, this is the one.

Harley Street Health District Conference 2026
📅 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
A full-day conference from the district becoming one of London’s biggest healthtech hubs.

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

Opportunities 💰

👶 Chief Digital Information Officer, Great Ormond Street Hospital: GOSH is hiring a CDIO to run digital, data, ICT and AI. The advert declares agentic AI as an ambition, which is a bold move for an NHS organisation, and music to the ears of everyone who came along to Wednesday’s event. It closes on Friday, so if you want to apply, you'd better shake a tail feather (or just completing the application would probably be fine).

😴 Director, Partnerships and Enterprise International Growth, Ōura: We’ve all heard the whispers of a ‘magical’ valuation and big things in the pipeline for Ōura, so it’s a GREAT time to get on board if you’re a London-based revenue fiend that likes to travel and track your sleep.

Clinical Specialist, Microsoft AI: Microsoft is building its medical superintelligence and wants a doctor sitting inside the engineering pod. Requires a medical degree with at least two years of postgraduate clinical experience alongside hands-on AI engineering.

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

00:00 - Post-Event Debrief: Behind the Scenes with Jeremy Hunt & Tara Donnelly
13:00 - AI in the NHS: Adoption, Procurement Red Tape & AI Sovereignty
37:00 - Craft Over AI Slop: Why Doing Hard Things Matters

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com
✍️ Apply to be a podcast guest using this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1PkAwCjniQjiGl53i8dtZ8g3xer2
📖 Learn more about the SomX team at https://somx.health

Somewhere in the basement of your nearest hospital, there’s a room full of glass where every biopsy goes under a microscope and decisions are made whether it’s cancer, how aggressive it is, and how far it’s spread.

Since roughly 2011, as you’d expect, machines have been able to read some of those slides more consistently than humans. That’s been cleared by the regulators, built and sold by the largest diagnostics companies on earth, and yet, most laboratories, in most countries, still haven’t bought any of it.

Why? Is this not a perfect, impactful problem to solve with AI?

Yes it is. But healthcare has forever grappled with a big problem. Perfect products can do absolutely nothing within an imperfect system.

Understand this and you understand a great deal about how (and how not) to innovate in healthcare…

Three different purchases

One bit of orientation first. The difference between pathology, digital pathology and AI pathology, so we’re all clear…

Pathology here means histopathology, i.e. tissue. Someone takes a biopsy or removes a tumour, the tissue is fixed, set in wax, sliced at a few microns, stained and mounted on a glass slide. A pathologist puts the glass under a microscope and decides what it is, how aggressive it is, and how far it’s spread. That is where a cancer diagnosis is actually made.

Digital pathology is a whole-slide scanner turning each slide into a gigapixel image, the pathologist reports from a screen rather than a microscope, and no more do you have a physical thing to store, break, transport etc.. That’s all digital pathology is. No AI anywhere. What it requires (again, note this…) is scanners, a network, an image management system, integration with the lab’s information system, and a lot of storage (not cheap). One site quoted 500,000 slides a year generating a whopping 800TB.

AI pathology is algorithms reading those images. Flagging which cores look malignant, counting stained cells, grading, quantifying the protein expression that determines whether someone gets a targeted therapy.

Now, those are separate purchases by the way and you need the previous one to get the next one. There’s no AI without digital. An algorithm has nothing to read until the glass has been scanned, so every AI pathology company is selling to a site that’s already forked out seven figures for digital infrastructure. And by the way, on the best evidence available, the financial return is… wait for it… pretty much nothing.

Facepalm. I’ll go into that in a second.

One industry count said 31% of primary diagnoses in the UK are now reported through an image management system, against roughly 23% in Europe and Asia and just 10% in the US. So any debate you see about model performance is happening on a fraction of what you’d expect.

The sceptic built it

Steve Burnell is worth listening to on this because he no longer has a horse in this particular race. I did a podcast with him recently (soon to be released). He went to Roche through an acquisition, sat inside the Foundation Medicine and Flatiron deals, ran digital pathology globally, and now runs Tenmile, a $250m evergreen fund backed by Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s Tattarang in Australia.

He gives three reasons why the thing he built didn’t sell. And these should be a warning to all innovators across healthtech too.

1. A regulatory trap that still hasn’t been fixed. To get an algorithm approved you have to show that it agrees with the gold standard, and the gold standard is a human pathologist. And when researchers went looking for the public evidence behind 26 commercial AI pathology products, they found that 24 had reached the market by self-certifying as general IVDs, and 15 of the 26 had no associated scientific publication at all.

“How often do you think you can get two human pathologists to agree on the diagnosis or the count of a cell membrane? The algorithm does it instantly and you know it’s doing it very very well, but then it’s got to get two pathologists out of three to agree with it in a blinded way.”

2. Workflow. Pathologists are rapid with a microscope, pathology skews senior, and keeping everything as it is means zero transition costs and zero risk.

3. Pathology labs are cost centres in the basement. They don’t sell anything and they’re invisible in the accounts.

“They are not visible in the healthcare economics system. So spending money in the pathology lab is a difficult thing to do.”

I’ll explain what I think that means and this is useful context for entrepreneurs.

In the UK, most NHS acute income now arrives through the aligned payment and incentive approach, i.e. the trust and its integrated care board agree on one largely fixed annual sum covering nearly all secondary care, topped up by unit-price payments for a defined list of activities. Elective work is on that list. Unbundled diagnostic imaging is on that list. Genomic testing is on that list. Do those things and get paid a bit extra, per thing.

Histopathology isn’t on that list, so that means reading a slide is never a payable event of its own.

Why is that important?

Well, take radiology as a comparison. Because it’s on the list, doing a scan has a price, so the department has products with a price and can sell those products. You can then write a business case to buy some tech that helps you sell more products to end up with more income.

Pathology can’t do that. It gets an allocation handed down out of the fixed envelope, which makes it a spender and never an earner. Worse, an efficiency gain in the lab doesn’t come back as money at all. It comes back as capacity. Capacity only becomes money if the trust converts it into something on that list. Or sacking humans of course. Classic.

So even if you sped everything up in a lab by 10x, it doesn’t improve the finances by a penny on its own. It actually worsens, because you had to buy something to get that speed increase.

Can pathology labs charge external sites for their service?

Yes, e.g. through direct-access work for GPs commissioned locally, referral work sold to other trusts under the hub-and-spoke networks, private patients, trials work for pharma etc.. Worth knowing, but it doesn’t change the problem because the core hospital cancer workload that digital pathology exists to accelerate still doesn’t actually get you any income.

Fork out for digital infrastructure and of course there are benefits when you take your finance hat off... patients starting treatment sooner, fewer repeat biopsies, fewer wasted MDT slots, less work outsourced, less locum cover, shorter stays, better performance against the 28-day faster diagnosis standard. But what’s depressing is that whoever signs the PO for that massive £2m infrastructure change gets no financial benefit themselves.

It’s another budget boundary issue and they plague healthcare innovation.

I asked Steve, “is this just money saved here, spent there, and nobody zooming out?”

Read more

Hello healthtechies,

It’s AI-assisted everything this week… brain surgery, prostate surgery, mental health therapies, cancer screening. And some bonus underwater robots.

Healthtech’s having a real moment and I’m almost certain that the 20’s (it’s very weird that we’re in “the 20s”) will be looked back on as the final pre-AI decade.

Lots to be optimistic about.

James.

PS: See you at SomX Healthtech Talks on Wednesday if you’re coming. It’s gonna be a good one.

News Bites 🥪

🩺 NHS England rolls out free HPV home-testing kits for millions of women: From today, roughly 4 million women in England who’ve missed their cervical screening invitations get a vaginal swab kit for high-risk HPV via the NHS app. Only 68.8% of eligible women are currently up to date (against an 80% target) due to embarrassment, discomfort, no time, and, frankly, the faff of booking an appointment to have a speculum used by a stranger. The YouScreen trial suggested self-testing could add around 400,000 screens a year, which would be a decent dent in the gap. No AI, no algorithm, strong use of the NHS App and its distribution.

💍 Oura faces class-action lawsuit over sleep tracking accuracy: Apparently a ring that measures heart rate, temperature and movement cannot credibly claim "95% sleep staging accuracy compared to clinical sleep lab" when polysomnography means electrodes on your scalp, leads on your eyes and sensors on your chin. Oura says its algorithm’s peer-reviewed, validated, and never marketed as a medical device, which is all true but, hear me out… I think that’s beside the point. If you use clinical language without accepting clinical accountability and people change their behaviour after wearing it, especially around something as fundamental to health as sleep, then saying “it’s a wellness device, not a medical device” is a loophole that, in my opinion, needs closing. Very interested in how this plays out…

🧠 The world's first live AI-assisted brain surgery went well: This is what we want to see from healthtech, and in BBC News too… Surgeons at UCLH went through the patient’s nose with an endoscope to reach an 11mm pituitary tumour pressing on his optic nerves (@medics, the classic optic chiasm, peripheral vision loss etc.), while a tool trained on hundreds of previous operations watched the video feed in real time and flagged where the carotid arteries and nerves were likely to be. Given a 25%-50% chance of not getting the whole mass out and 2% chance of hitting a major vessel, a second pair of AI generated eyes sounds pretty useful. Eight weeks on, full vision has returned. Textbook. NIHR and Google funded it, a bigger trial is coming, and this is healthtech doing its thing. Glorious.

📞 Limbic will test voice AI therapy with Medicare: The future’s here. Limbic have a voice AI agent that phones Medicare patients for 20-minute CBT sessions (with clinician oversight). Interestingly, Limbic set up its own medical group to become a licensed Medicare provider so it can share the risk. Respect. Ross Harper, CEO said "existing regulatory frameworks were not written for generative AI in healthcare" which is very true, but he isn’t hanging around until they change, and with FDA, is effectively improvising a pathway in real time. More interestingly, several US states are regulating against mental healthcare provision using AI while this goes through.

💦 AI-assisted water jet surgery is here, for prostate care: Next time you’re looking to assert your healthtech dominance over someone, ask their opinion on the latest advancements in “AI guided aquablation.” Then go on to explain that an 8,000 psi water jet, guided by ultrasound and an AI trained on 100,000 previous cases, strips out excess prostate tissue in BPH patients. It’s accurate to within a millimetre, so, thankfully, nothing like jet-washing your patio, which I know you’re wondering about. Jokes aside, so far, no new erectile dysfunction, ejaculation preserved in around 90% of patients, and stress incontinence <0.5%. Next to the traditional TURP numbers, I can tell you that is almost unbelievable. (To be clear, AI does the planning, not the cutting, and the surgeon signs off the plan.)

🔬 The AI-assisted breast cancer screening tool for pathology: Harrogate’s brought in a £40k AI-enabled HER2 tissue scanner, which digitises breast cancer samples and helps pathologists call HER2 status faster. The £40k’s from a charity, which is interesting in the context of innovation more broadly, because it’s not from a national programme, or a trust capital line. That’s the problem I’ve just written about for this week’s Pigeon Insider (out in the next couple of days - just awaiting sign-off from someone quoted in it). Essentially, pathology AI struggles to justify itself inside the normal NHS business model, because the savings are made within someone else's budget. And, even if it does get funded, the benefit’s a quicker department without any cash release, so no financial ROI. Hence, like here, it gets funded off-piste, by charities, goodwill and someone's labour of love. The model needs fixing.

🤿 The NHS has bought lifesaving robot submarines: The London Ambulance Service responds to more than 50 drowning incidents a year, and after a summer of heatwaves, it’s spent £40k on four underwater drones. The Hazardous Area Response Team uses sonar to find a submerged casualty, then sends a drone down with an arm attachment to bring them up, streaming video back to the operator on the bank. Deployment takes under two minutes from the water's edge, which, given warm water accelerates oxygen consumption and shortens an already brutal window, is vital. By NHS capital standards, essentially loose change behind the sofa leading to lifesaving tech being deployed. Excellent.

What to listen to 🔊

This week I chatted to Dr Sai Narimetla, an A&E doctor who simultaneously works in investment banking at SSG Capital. Officially, this is about why healthtech hasn't produced the exits that biotech and medical devices have, but in reality you’ll get just as much if you’re after a lesson in time management.

New estimates suggest the Federated Data Platform's benefit value is £1.7bn lower than the figure NHS England gave a year ago, plus the national safety watchdog's new investigation into NHS AI use.

Steve gets 51 minutes with Penny Dash, Chair of NHS England, and doesn't waste them. She takes a tour of the world's health systems (no clear winner, but she thinks India could end up the global exemplar by using tech to drive down the cost of care), explains why Germany prices surgery like a market, and lands some harder truths closer to home… your GP record and your hospital record are still two different systems, "world-class" EHRs are often just PDFs in a trenchcoat, and the single patient record fight has been recycling the same objections for thirty years.

Events 📅

Final, final, final call for Wednesday’s blockbuster event…

SomX Healthtech Talks: Will the NHS waste the AI moment?
🗓️ 2 September
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
We’re back. And this time, we’re bringing the Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt who served as Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. He’s joined by myself (Dr James Somauroo), Tara Donnelly, one of the NHS’s most respected digital leaders and former Chief Digital Officer at NHS England, and Jack Needham, cofounder of Sanctuary Health, bringing AI to the NHS. I want to get to the nub of where AI can tangibly make a difference in secondary care, where it’ll disappoint, and what it’ll actually take behind the scenes for the health service to truly seize the day. Expect Chatham House Rule, real opinions and stories never heard.

Register interest

HealthVC Summit 2026
🗓️ 2-3 September
📍 🇨🇭 Zurich.
Two days connecting health investors and founders across Europe, China and Saudi Arabia. If you’re raising, this is where the cheque-writers gather.

Longevity Investors Conference 2026
🗓️ 14-17 September
📍 🇨🇭 Gstaad.
Family offices, funds and private investors in a ski resort, talking rejuvenation science with the people doing it. Heavy on capital, occasionally light on endpoints, but the money moving into longevity is real and worth watching.

Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House
📅 15 September
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
MHIN’s showcase returns to the Harley Street Health District for a full day (noon to 9pm, so pace yourself) of mental health innovation. Given how much of this space still runs on vibes rather than evidence, worth your time.

Life Sciences Week 2026
🗓️ 21-25 September
📍 🇬🇧 Birmingham.
Britain’s national life sciences week, pulling biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors into one place. A proper cross-sector convening rather than the usual echo chamber.

LSI Europe ‘26 Emerging Medtech Summit
🗓️ 28 September-1 October
📍 🇪🇸 Barcelona.
Europe’s leading emerging-medtech investor summit, matching founders with VCs, PE and strategics. Sunny, well-connected, and squarely aimed at getting deals done.

HETT Show 2026
🗓️ 29-30 September
📍 🇬🇧 ExCeL, London.
Three thousand-odd NHS digital and clinical leaders, 150 suppliers and five CPD streams under one roof at ExCeL. If you want to know what trusts are actually buying rather than what vendors wish they were buying, this is the one.

Harley Street Health District Conference 2026
📅 20 October
📍 🇬🇧 1 Wimpole Street, London.
A full-day conference from the district becoming one of London’s biggest healthtech hubs.

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

Opportunities 💰

🏥 Clinical Triage Manager, DDM Health: DDM’s Gro Health platform just picked up the £1.5m Birmingham obesity pathway contract and this is the operational role that makes it work. Non-clinical, remote, managing referrals and eligibility for their Tier 3 Weight Management Service.

🩺 Clinical Safety Officer, Healthtech-1: Healthtech-1’s building the front door of UK healthcare, with registration software in 26% of English GP practices. You'd own clinical safety across every product… DCB0129 artefacts, hazard workshops, incident investigation. GMC registration and NHS experience required, and the office sits inside a working GP practice in East London.

⚙️ Clinical Engineer, Anima: Anima's care enablement platform handles triage, documents and care navigation across EMIS and SystmOne for a few hundred practices. Medical degree required, coding experience isn't, which is a rare way in if you’re medical and you want to build.

📣 Want something in front of our 8,000+ 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.

00:00 - Intro: This Week's AI Health Tech Roundup 
01:00 - Are Wearables Lying to You About Sleep?
15:00 - NHS Rolls Out At-Home Cervical Screening
21:00 - Brain Surgery, Therapy Bots & Life-Saving Drones
34:00 - Jeremy Hunt Showdown

🗞 Grab the newsletter at www.healthtechpigeon.com

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

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