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.

📣 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 - 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

Hello healthtechies.

I’d count to 10 before you read the first one this week. The optimism kicks in after that.

Enjoy.

James.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Autonomous AI should replace doctors, argues bioethicist and VCs: Ok deep breath… TLDR, a JAMA paper’s argued that ‘AI-only care’ will outperform ‘human-AI teams’ by 2030. Hmm… The authors? Bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and Curai Health's Neal Khosla (son of Vinod Khosla, a VC and early OpenAI backer with a massive stake in raising the enterprise value of AI companies by saying things like “‘AI-only care’ will outperform ‘human-AI teams’ by 2030”…). My opinion? Well, I disagree, along with many others in the comments section. Their evidence? Shaky, reductive, ill-understanding of the context of medicine if you ask me. If pushed, I’d say a big swing and a miss, and kind of insulting to healthcare workers as a powerful, loud, uninformed minority often dismiss people’s vocations and disrespectfully speculate on their livelihoods. Transiently dropping into healthcare to push a certain narrative (that completely changes the fabric of the industry, by the way) when you have a clear financial incentive is so obviously wrong, it’s like a caricature of an ethics scenario. Do I think healthcare will move to some AI-only pathways? Actually yes at some point. But articles like this won’t speed that up. Respectful, innovative entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals will.

I’ve invited them onto the podcast for a genuinely open minded chat.

🖥️ Dame Caroline Clarke to be NHS Online CEO: When I started in what is now healthtech, the thought we’d have an entire trust existing inside an NHS App would have been incomprehensible. I know I lean into cynicism for comedic effect in this newsletter a lot, but I did just find myself having a little reflective moment. We’re doing ok in the sector guys. Anyway it now has a chief exec and it’s Dame Caroline Clarke. If you don’t know her, she started her NHS career as a finance trainee in 1991, was Finance Director at multiple NHS Trusts and an Associate Partner in KPMG’s health strategy team, formerly group CEO at the Royal Free and currently Regional Director for the NHS in London. Heck of a CV and the task is to build the trust from scratch ahead of a 2027 launch. GPs will be able to refer into it for glaucoma, IBD, iron deficiency anaemia, prostate conditions, and menopause and menstrual issues (all areas where waits are long and the evidence for remote care is reasonably strong). Would LOVE to get Dame Caroline onto The Healthtech Podcast so we can all learn what’s going on over there - if anyone can do an intro let me know!

👩‍🔬 61 women, £75k each, and a decade of shifting the numbers: Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation programme has its 10th cohort. 100 female founders, 61 get £75k and a year of business support, the rest getting the support without the cash (bit harsh). The projects range from wearables that spot dehydration risk, AI that cuts MRI scan time by up to 90%, smart pressure sensors woven into everyday textiles, RNA therapeutics aimed at the biological drivers of Parkinson’s and loads more, obviously. Since 2016, £15m has gone into companies that have gone on to raise £358m, and the share of successful women-led applications across all Innovate UK competitions has moved from one in seven to one in three. Ideal. More to do.

🧫 Britain’s growing tiny organs so mice don’t have to: A £20m MRC-funded hub in Cambridge is going to build a standardised, validated library of organoids (mini organs) grown from NHS patient cells and it’ll be open to academics and industry to do things on/with/to. Over 90% of drugs that clear animal testing go on to fail in humans, and as Matthias Zilbauer puts it, ‘a mouse can’t tell you which treatment works in which patient.’ Yep. First up are organoids for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s, with tumour and brain models following, and another £2m from Innovate UK’s going into 9 safety-testing projects like VivoSphere’s heart cells in gel spheres. Nobody’s claiming animal use ends here, but 2.54 million procedures were carried out in Britain last year, and it’s a step in the right direction.

🩸 Your glucose data is moving in with Gemini: Abbott’s Lingo CGM’s plugging into the Google Health app for all the usual ‘better advice’ stuff you’d expect, but there’s also the largest real-world metabolic health study ever brewing. It’ll combine those continuous glucose readings with wearable, lab and survey data, with the findings feeding back into the coaching. Lingo’s over-the-counter, for adults not on insulin, and explicitly not a diagnostic, which, let’s be honest, blurs as soon as an AI starts telling you what your numbers mean. Google’s own caveat is that the coach isn’t for medical purposes and you should check its answers... Study? Valuable. Coaching? Not sure. Yet.

🍷 Ozempic did it for food, naltrexone might do it for alcohol: Despite being one of the biggest preventable causes of harm in the UK, alcohol’s largely been left without a major support movement. Nul’s raised $1m to change that, building a remote subscription service around naltrexone and The Sinclair Method, where you take the pill before you drink and let the brain's reward pathways gradually lose interest. Reduction-not-abstinence is the framing, which opens the door to the enormous group of people who know they're drinking too much but would never walk into a service labelled addiction. 120 paying customers is a good start to show it’s valuable.

This week’s Pigeon Insider tells you literally everything you need to know about the FDP. And I’ll be honest - I didn’t know much about it at all before I started, so I spoke to someone who built it, did a podcast and wrote this thing here.

Enjoy 👇🏼

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This is the chat that informed the article above for Pigeon Insider. Everything about the FDP. Enjoy.

Martin Ratz co-founded Doccla after a heart attack. Lying in a hospital bed in Stockholm, he noticed that inside the building you’re monitored constantly, but the minute you leave, nobody’s watching. Why? No good reason. Did he change that? Yes.

Ellyn Winters-Robinson was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2022, months before ChatGPT existed, and wrote a book about it on her iPhone during chemo. That book became AskEllyn, an AI companion for cancer patients now used in a hundred countries. Yet, she's the one telling patients not to upload their records to LLMs.

What happens when a South African anaesthetist survives cerebral oedema on Everest, bootstraps an NHS appraisal platform with no external funding, and sells it to one of the UK's fastest-growing health tech companies? 👆🏼 That.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is…

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 💰

🧬 Customer Success Manager, StoreGene: StoreGene sequences your whole genome once and then keeps reanalysing it as new variants get discovered, so a sample taken today can still be answering clinical questions decades from now. The role sits alongside the Head of Clinical Success, finding and onboarding clinics, explaining genomic use cases to sceptical clinicians, and keeping kits, samples and reports moving without anything going missing. Good one if you've got a science or clinical background and fancy being the person who actually gets genomics into clinics. ⭐️ Featured Role ⭐️

🏥 Chief Digital Information Officer, Great Ormond Street Hospital: Running digital, data, ICT and AI across the whole Trust, reporting to the COO. VSM pay, permanent, closes 11th September. You’d own the digital strategy, the cyber posture and the AI governance framework.

🩺 Clinical Engineer, Anima: Anima does care navigation for 20% of the population. The ask is a medical degree and the ability to actually ship code, TypeScript and React on serverless AWS. £75k to £150k plus equity, London hybrid. If you’re a doctor who quietly prefers the engineering to the clinic, this pays you properly for both.

📋 Clinical Evaluation Specialist, Scarlet: Scarlet is the approved body doing medical device and AI conformity assessment. You’d spend your days pressure-testing whether the clinical evidence supports the claim. £75k to £90k plus equity, London. Clinicians who know their way around ISO 14155 will never get more leverage over what reaches patients.

☁️ Healthcare Strategic Lead and Clinical Innovation Lead, AWS UK Public Sector Healthcare: AWS is clearly building out its NHS bench. The Strategic Lead (London or Manchester) is business cases that get through Trust CFOs and procurement frameworks. The Clinical Innovation Lead is the clinical half of the same pincer movement, so enough credibility to earn a CCIO’s trust, plus the patience to nurture pursuits over 12 to 18 months in AI pathways, genomics and population health.

📣 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.

Hello healthtech homies.

We’ve been pretty UK NHS heavy for the past few weeks, so I’m bringing you a more global flavour to this week’s news with stories from the US, Australia and Europe.

Plenty happening with new devices - exoskeletons, thermal cameras, robots - the cool side of healthtech.

And of course, the usual big AI company-tries-to-dominate-eveything story, but hey, on the way to ruling us all and the inevitable dystopia, it looks like they’ll solve a few healthcare problems along the way.

Enjoy.

James.

News Bites 🥪

🎗️🇺🇸 OpenAI makes moves to cure hepatitis and fix oncology trials: OpenAI’s making serious healthcare moves. Their foundation’s committed $100m to ‘at least double’ hepatitis C cure rates across 8 US jurisdictions. Although hepatitis C already has a cure (8-12 weeks of antivirals, over 95% effective) 2/3 of those infected in the US never get treated and there are 40 deaths per day, which is pretty shocking. Meanwhile Massive Bio‘s been named an OpenAI Select Partner for turning oncology trial eligibility criteria into something machine-readable, which is one of those problems you can’t believe is a problem in 2026. It’s starting to become pretty clear as I write this every week… these AI behemoths want to tackle healthcare. Badly. And they’re throwing a lot at it.

🔬🇦🇺 New AI spots the bowel cancers that’ll come back: With stage-two bowel cancer, most patients are cured by surgery, but some relapse and we don’t currently have a reliable way of knowing who that’ll be. This tool looks at the edge of the tumour, where it pushes into surrounding tissue, and predicts relapse. We’ve known that’s a thing, but the human eye is subjective and inconsistent, so a great example of the technology giving us a stepwise improvement. Built on 1,600-plus slides and validated across 1,220 patients in three independent cohorts, it sounds pretty rigorous. And the cherry on top is that it runs on routine digital pathology, so no new tests, no fresh tissue, no “oh just do this really quick extra 10 step thing.” Ideal.

🦄🇺🇸 Five healthtechs on Forbes’ unicorns-in-waiting list: Forbes and TrueBridge do this every year, and their hit rate’s pretty good - 60% of the 275 alumni went on to become actual unicorns. So here we go… a quarter of this year’s twenty are health. Ossium Health runs the world’s first bone marrow bank in Indiana, freezing marrow from deceased donors so blood cancer patients can be transplanted on demand. Abby Care trains families to become paid caregivers using Medicaid money for care they were already giving for free. Valthos, backed by OpenAI and selling to the US Department of Defense, builds AI models to characterise pathogens before they become the pandemic. Fortell Research makes an AI hearing aid. And Lotus Health offers free 24/7 virtual primary care in 50+ languages.

🦶🇦🇺 Thermal camera reads wounds’ heat signatures: Diabetic foot ulcers are a devastating complication and they end in infection, amputation and early death. Up to a third of people with diabetes will get one and they’re tricky to assess and treat to say the least. THERMUL, out of the University of Melbourne and RMIT, points a smartphone thermal camera at the wound and predicts 12 week healing from a heat pattern in <60s. It’s been trained on 110 patients so far, which, ok, is no RCT but with 400 more patients and a submission with TGA (their regulator) to come, it looks promising. Ticks many boxes for rural adoption and has implications for global health too.. cheap ✅ portable ✅ and easy to adopt and use ✅. One to watch.

🦾🇦🇺 A robot that scans your veins so a sonographer doesn’t have to: Another Aussie story… Vexev has raised $6m (taking it to $19m) for VxWave, which uses robotics and AI to automate upper-limb vascular imaging, starting with dialysis access. I worked on a dialysis unit for a while and this is a very sensible starting point, given those patients need their fistulas checked constantly and the workflow is repetitive enough.

🦿🇫🇷 The exoskeleton finally leaves the rehab gym: This is awesome. Wandercraft (a Parisian-founded robotics company) has achieved FDA clearance for Eve, which is a self-balancing personal exoskeleton for adults with spinal cord injuries. On their website, they say the device is for at home, and poignant was a list of benefits that I’m sure most of us reading take for granted every single day… “have a conversation face-to-face, bake a cake, brush your teeth, interact with loved ones while standing upright.” They’ve had a clinic-version of the device active for some time but this is a true at-home device to augment wheelchair use.

🦠🇺🇸 Contact tracing, but for the ward you’re already on: I’m always switched on for this type of company. Living through a pandemic whilst working in healthtech and seeing how we’ve gone about things since has always given me this feeling of unease. I feel like we quickly forget and maybe it’s all behind the scenes, but I’m not aware of any big plans for the next one. The likelihood of another global pandemic is 100%. In our lifetime, ok, maybe a bit less, but thankfully, Claryx has come out of stealth with $3.5m pre-seed for CloneLink, which sequences pathogen genomes from confirmed infections and works out whether cases sit in the same transmission chain. Cleverer still, it compares those against a genomic map of a hospital, built from air, water and surface samples. Multiple health systems are apparently already using it (phew) and knowing where a bug actually came from beats “deep clean and fingers crossed.”

🩺🇬🇧 31% of UK doctors are planning to leave medicine, new report finds:

State of Medical Education & Doctors in the UK 2026 report surveyed medical students and doctors across six career stages, and the numbers are predictably grim… 31% are actively planning to leave UK medicine or switch specialty, with another 54% considering it. Worse, 78% of foundation doctors don’t feel confident entering clinical practice, and 61% don’t feel prepared for the realities of the job. Nice.

And finally…

🧘 Seven days of meditation will apparently rewire your brain: If you needed an excuse to chill the f*** out, 20 healthy adults went on a week-long retreat, did 33 hours of guided meditation, and came back with altered fMRI connectivity, raised endogenous opioids, and plasma that made lab-grown neurons sprout longer branches after it had been removed from their bodies. The UC San Diego team reckon the brain patterns look a bit like psilocybin, minus the psilocybin. But always check the method, folks… no control group, no clinical population, and the retreat was run by the co-author who’s employed by the company selling the retreat (which is disclosed to be fair). BUT, come on now… if plasma from a meditating person makes neurons in a dish start growing, someone should probably find out why. Plasma marketplace startup, anyone?

This week’s Pigeon Insider (the upgrade to this glorious newsletter) is a huge deep dive on the Federated Data Platform. I hardly knew what it was before researching this and I had Tom Bartlett who helped build it on a podcast to ask him all about it.

I go over the technology, the controversies, the ethics and of course, Palantir.

Enjoy 👇🏼

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

Great episode on AI and patient consent, which, let’s be honest, is the greyest of areas currently. When does a patient need telling that AI is involved in their care, given there's still no case law or formal NHS guidance on it?

Yale AI ethicist Jess Morley, formerly of the UK Department of Health and Social Care, makes the case for "sceptical optimism" on health AI, reframes ambient scribes as inference engines rather than transcription tools, and argues LLMs should be regulated as medical devices. Great series by Tjasa here.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is…

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.

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
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt 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.

TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.

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 Associate in Sales & Success, Heidi Health (London): A role built for early-career or recently-practising clinicians who fancy a move into healthtech without leaving clinical judgement at the door. Heidi’s ambient scribe is already powering millions of patient visits a week, so you’d be joining at proper scale, not a two-person pilot.

🩺 Various roles at Neko Health: Daniel Ek's preventive scanning outfit closed a $700m Series C in July at a reported $7bn valuation, and the board is now roughly 90 roles deep. Clinical roles like GPs, nurses, healthcare assistants, echocardiographers, biomedical scientists across London, Manchester and Birmingham, alongside a US build-out in New York and Miami. Plenty for non-clinical too… EMEA regulatory affairs (UK Responsible Person, MHRA relationship, the lot) and a stack of engineering roles out of Stockholm.

🏥 Chief Digital Information Officer, Barking Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust: One of the bigger digital jobs going in the NHS right now. BHRUT serves over a million people across North East London with 8,400 staff, and they've just put in a new EPR, which means the hard part (making it actually useful) is still ahead. You'd sit on the Executive Team reporting straight to the CEO, owning digital, data and AI strategy, cyber resilience and the platform estate. VSM band, permanent, Romford-based across sites. Closes 23 August.

📣 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 & setup
06:38 – Why Tom spoke out
35:15 – A coordinated campaign?
50:49 – Where FDP falls short

🗞 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

Hello insiders. A confession from me to start this week’s piece…

Despite being in healthtech, talking about healthtech and writing about healthtech, I’ve not really had anything interesting to say on the FDP for (genuinely) being unsure of what it actually is. I knew it was NHS technology and some sort of data sandbox or warehouse or sandcastle or something, but not much beyond that.

So I thought “why not invite someone who built the thing onto a podcast to chat about it.” And the below is a summary of everything I researched before and after, and everything I learned on that podcast. Enjoy.

Let’s start with what the FDP actually is.

The FDP, which stands for Federated Data Platform, is something that people in and around the NHS and technology have been talking about for ages and it’s okay if you’re cagey on the details - it’s not explained particularly well anywhere I’ve seen to be honest.

My understanding… it’s the result of a pretty basic, first-principles idea that data’s all over the place in the NHS which sucks, so how about we centralise it so we know more stuff about it, can do more stuff with it, and we can build more tech stuff based on it that all of us in the NHS can use.

With me so far? Sounds like a good idea. An essential one really.

NHS England describes it as “connecting vital health information across the NHS, helping staff deliver better care for patients and work more efficiently.” Predictably vague, ok, but, again, what actually is the technology?

Well… it’s one piece of software, installed separately inside each NHS organisation (hence “federated”), with a set of apps sitting on top of it that each do a specific job. NHS England calls these “products” and they’re things like referral to treatment validation, inpatient and outpatient care coordination, theatre and bed planning, and discharge tracking.

It’s useful, relatively unglamorous, admin-type stuff and, ok, nobody’s curing disease directly with a bed state dashboard, but if you’ve ever met a discharge coordinator on a Friday afternoon or heaven forbid you have a patient in a bed they want, you’ll absolutely know why that’s useful.

In case you’re trying to visualise this, it isn’t exactly a national database / sandbox / sandcastle either. Each trust has its own separate FDP instance and stays the data controller for its own data. NHS England is only the data controller for the national instance. That means everyone’s medical records aren’t just sloshing around in a single place. Your trust’s data stays in your trust’s box.

Also worth saying is that GP data isn’t in it. Separate issue.

The benefits

Tom Bartlett spent 20 years inside NHS data teams, ran NHS England’s data engineering function, took over the FDP team in January 2024 and left earlier this year. Since leaving, he’s since written some pretty eye watering and honest blogs about the experience. His description of the tech and its benefits are pretty convincing though…

However, almost every MP who has spoken on it, Tom says, describes a data warehouse, which is pretty reductive because it’s easier to attack for other reasons when you’re not appropriately attributing its benefits. A data warehouse tells you what happened last month, whereas operational software tells a clinician what to do on a ward, now.

On the podcast we did together, Tom talked through multiple examples of outrageous existing processes that would be relics of the past if the FDP got going…

• A hospital board round where the team projects a spreadsheet of patient names onto the wall, because updating each record in the electronic patient record would take eight clicks across different screens and would burn the whole half hour they have.

• Nurses walking wards with printouts annotated in biro.

• Staff at <redacted (but could literally be any) hospital> queueing on a Friday afternoon for the one working computer.

• Discharge decisions made by phone between two hospitals, tracked on a whiteboard.

Nice. So what’s the problem?

The reason none of this is simple is that NHS England awarded the contract in November 2023 to a consortium led by Palantir Technologies UK, alongside Accenture, PwC, Carnall Farrar and NECS.

• £330m

• Funding for up to 240 NHS organisations

• Formally starting in March 2024

£330m doesn’t sound like a lot when you consider that 20 years and roughly £2bn of electronic patient record deployments later, only about 30% of clinicians say their EPR helps them do their job. The FDP sounds like a fantastic deal in that context for all the potential benefit, no? (That was a figure Tom cited on the podcast by the way).

The issue is that Palantir is far from a normal supplier…

Read more

Sup healthtechies.

All I really need to say this week is that literal humanoid robots are operating on pigs now. They’re stealing the show… and probably your next surgical job.

There are some other stories in this week, but let’s be honest, that’s the one you’re interested in on a Sunday night!

Enjoy.

News Bites 🥪

🤖 Two humanoid robots just took out a pig's gallbladder: I mean… two literal robots with arms and legs just did a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. They walked in and used standard laparoscopic instruments in a standard theatre. Questions include “why?” and “who consented the pig?” In answer to the first question, the alternative robot option is a da Vinci machine, which needs its own instruments, its own docking ritual and its own postcode given the size of it, whereas these little humanoid characters just walk in and get on with it. Yes, precision, latency, safety and all that stuff are all still miles off clinical grade (again, who tf consented the pig?), and the authors do admit that, which is refreshing (again, if you’re not a pig). TLDR… it’s a feasibility study, not a product, but it's a step towards an argument for actual robots doing actual surgery. Is this feet-up-utopia or existential-dystopia? No idea. Absolute knife edge. How fun.

🔬 OpenAI’s giving away frontier models to 100,000 scientists: It feels like unlocking the secrets of human biology is the really big prize for these whopper AI companies. ChatGPT for Academic Researchers starts with 10,000 researchers this summer and scales to 100,000 by 2027. It’s part of a $250m commitment to “external scientific research and discovery.” Participants get GPT-5.6 across ChatGPT, Work and Codex, plus 75-odd life science skills covering genomics, single-cell analysis, protein modelling and drug discovery, and connectors into public genomic and clinical databases. At Boston Children’s, their “co-pilot geneticist” has apparently cracked more than 40 previously unresolved rare disease diagnoses so far. Impressive.

💍 Samsung announces FDA-cleared smart ring for sleep apnoea: This could be really impactful given the incidence and downstream effects of sleep apnoea… The Galaxy Ring is getting FDA-cleared to flag risk of the condition. Wear it for two nights in a 10-day window, an algorithm counts your breathing disruptions per hour and sorts you into one of three buckets. It's risk detection for moderate to severe OSA in undiagnosed adults, so not a ‘diagnosis,’ before anyone shouts ‘gotcha'.’ The consumer wearables lot are now quietly running a very large, very unfunded case-finding programme for a condition that sleep services are already struggling to keep up with. Not the first time I’ve concluded that a sleep clinic is a good investment rn.

🏖️ The MHRA has opened a sandbox and yes, it's actually open: Ten AI medical device manufacturers will get to deploy in live NHS settings across London under direct MHRA oversight, alongside NHS England (London) and the Health Innovation Networks. No application fee, EOIs open until all ten slots are filled, and the priority areas are heart health, neighbourhood care, and anything that stops the NHS App disappointing us. Obviously, 10 devices is a small number for a city of 9,000,000+, but this is about generating real-world evidence of ongoing safety and effectiveness, to inform regulatory decisions. If you build AI-enabled devices and you're not sending an application in, have a word with yourself.

🇺🇳 The UN has read the AI hype and remains unmoved: I found this pretty interesting - the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI has published a preliminary report, essentially saying ‘the model is the easy bit.’ AlphaFold, AI-assisted breast screening, diabetic retinopathy screening reaching 600,000 people in India, all great, but all dependent on referral pathways, trained staff and local language support sitting underneath them. AND. Strip out the care network and you've basically built a confident machine for telling people bad news with nowhere to send them. Also, a sensible line drawn between task-specific clinical AI and general-purpose models, which belong nowhere near a diagnosis (I know we talk about that a lot here). They call out sycophantic models being linked to serious mental health harm and consumer chatbots are drifting into clinical use. Procurement is the intervention but good luck making that ‘innovation’ sound cool.

⚖️ [Nature] AI can't fix a system that's already unequal: A solid perspective from LSE Health in npj Digital Medicine that also gives rise to this glorious diagram below. Makes the point that AI doesn't land in a vacuum, it lands in whatever health system you've already got, and if that system is unequal it will happily automate the inequality at scale. A review of 692 FDA-approved AI medical devices showed that <20% reported the age distribution of their study population, 3.6% reported race or ethnicity, and 1% reported anything about socioeconomic status. They also note that most studies generate a single output per question, which for a stochastic* system is a bit like tasting one chip and reviewing the restaurant. Essentially, you can have the best-validated model on the planet but it’s not going reach the people who need it most if the evidence base was built on the wrong population.

* Stochastic = involving random probability. So if you run a stochastic process multiple times with the same data, you’ll get different outputs.

And finally…

💨 We’re all farting twice as much as the texbooks say: Don’t ever say we don’t tackle the heavy journalism here at Healthtech Pigeon. Exactly what you’d expect… an electrochemical sensor clips onto your pants and measures hydrogen in your flatus. Like a CGM, but for intestinal gas. Turns out we all blow out our backside around 32 times a day, roughly double the long-quoted figure of 14, with one participant clocking an impressive 59. Next up is the Human Flatus Atlas (I’m serious), a nationwide US study recruiting Zen Digesters, Hydrogen Hyperproducers and, delightfully, Normal People. Mock all you like, but gastroenterologists haven’t actually had an objective measure of this, and the field's most cited authority on the subject was known as the ‘King of Farts.’ There’s a joke about a throne somewhere but you get the idea.

Pigeon Insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you who want deep research and to steal fantastic ideas so you can sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.

Below, is a link to last week’s edition.

It’s inspired by a very long conversation I had with Deborah Cohen (medically qualified, investigative journalist, ex Science Editor at ITV News, ex Health Correspondent at BBC Newsnight, built the investigations unit at the BMJ and author of Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health)

It’s a very deep dive into the absolute sh*t show of B2C healthcare marketing in a world of AI, influencers and criminals. The bad, the very bad and the ugly 👇🏼

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

Jessica from SomX chatted through all the best mental health news from this week with help from Aahuti Rai. FYI… Mind has launched an independent Commission, Mental Health in the Age of AI, and its call for evidence is open to anyone with lived experience of using AI for their mental health, professionals working in mental health or tech, and organisations with a stake in it.

Robert Forbes, Field CISO at SHI, on why agentic AI breaks the traditional non-human identity model, and why healthcare's AI moment is fundamentally different from every other industry's.

Dr Sarah Townley, Deputy Medical Director at Medical Protection, on why clinicians risk absorbing all the legal responsibility for flawed AI-assisted decisions, and what the MPS's new Safer Practice Framework recommends.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is…

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.

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
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt 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.

TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.

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 Associate, Hardian Health (Remote, UK only, £45K): See above. Writing clinical evaluation protocols and regulatory submissions for SaMD and AIaMD, reporting into a team that isn’t afraid to publicly disagree with the regulator when the logic doesn’t hold.

💼 Associate Director of Digital Development, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust: A Band 8d job running digital development at Royal Berkshire, with a £10m+ budget and a brief covering everything from data integration to getting AI actually adopted rather than just piloted. £94k to £109k, based in Reading, closes 11 August.

🤖 AI Implementation Manager, Cambridge University Hospitals: Addenbrooke's wants someone to run multiple AI tools in live clinical use at once.. monitoring performance, spotting drift early, and getting the things embedded in workflows rather than parked in a pilot. Band 8a, £57.5k to £64.7k, closes 17 August.

🤝 UK&I Partnerships Lead, Heidi (London): Heidi’s ambient scribe is already powering two million patient visits a week globally. This role owns the integration and ecosystem partnerships that drive NHS-scale adoption. Wants 4+ years in partnerships or channel, ideally SaaS or healthtech, hybrid with three days in the office.

📣 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.

Mental Health Innovation Showcase, Hale House — 15 September, London
https://harleystreethealthdistrict.com/event/mental-health-innovation-showcase-returns-to-harley-street-health-district/

🗞 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

Hello healthtech world.

As if you thought SomX Healthtech Talks couldn’t get any better, we asked ourselves what the spiciest debate could possibly be and, TLDR… I’m interviewing the Rt Hon. Sir Jeremy Hunt on a panel on 2nd September.

More details in the events section towards the end of this email, but if you can’t even wait until then, hit that to register interest in coming 👇🏼

Register interest

Onto some healthtech news. It’s AI heavy, but that’s life. Don’t shoot the messenger 🤷🏻‍♂️

James 👋🏼

News Bites 🥪

🎙️ The MHRA says your AI scribe isn't a medical device: This is causing waves online (understandably). If you’re in the UK, apparently it’s about the intended use, not the technology… If you transcribe, summarise, structure, code, draft discharge letters, that’s all fine. But offer "generated insights" with suggested diagnoses, or let an agent order tests without a clinician looking, and you're class IIa.. For me, this is an odd one. Summarisation is a clinical judgement - you’re deciding what matters and what doesn’t, so it’s bizarre to me that hasn’t been recognised as medical device activity and it’s convenient that it opens the UK to the all the big platforms we talk about on here regularly to flick a switch and wipe out the small companies. The MHRA also stuck a “not legally binding” disclaimer at the top, which it doesn’t usually do, so read into that what you will…

🤝 T-Pro buys BigHand Healthcare: Now, with that 👆🏼 in mind, a clinical documentation platform has acquired a workflow orchestration provider, which, I hear you, is absolutely not a Hollywood film idea, BUT it’s a signal of what’s happening at the big, boring, ‘actually-have-money’ end of healthtech. T-Pro is the Dublin dictation outfit that’s been in NHS trusts since 2012 (now 120 of them and around 200 staff). Tortus, Heidi, Tandem and friends all built the ambient product first and are now grinding through procurement to add customers. T-Pro already has the customers and is now buying everything else… Going that way round is arguably a lot easier.

🥼 40% of TikTok’s top health videos are hosted by doctors who don’t exist: 1,198 videos were analysed and there was AI-generated content in 40% of the top health clips (rising to 84% for “health tips”). Average views on the top synthetic doctor videos were 2.5 million! Classic nonsense like Coca-Cola and onion for pain relief and NHS England, the BMA and the RCGP have all gone for the expected “danger to public safety”. How do you punish a fake doctor? Well you can’t GMC something that isn’t on the GMC register, so good luck. I actully covered this (and a load of other things in the media vs medicine melting pot) in Pigeon Insider this week. Hospitals are even fighting deepfakes of their own doctors being used to direct people to buying drugs online. B2C healthcare marketing is in trouble.

🧑‍⚕️ AI patients for real doctors: Sounds dystopian, but isn't, fortunately. Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust is running an 18-month project with their local med school to use AI-generated virtual patient avatars to let third-year students practise psychiatric history-taking, communication and clinical reasoning before they meet anyone real. Med students are clearly already doing this and 100 variations on the theme and actors are lovely… but expensive and finite. So something formally developed with input from people with lived experience of mental illness is ideal.

💨 TidalSense raises £14m to put a COPD breath test in NHS clinics: Good to see someone dragging lung diagnostics out of the 1800s. It’s the first non-spirometry AI diagnostic device to be CE-marked for COPD and it showed >90% precision compared to existing spirometry's 71% precision in primary care. Needs 75 seconds of normal breathing and no forced manoeuvre required. Money goes on NHS and international rollout, expanding into asthma, and building out commercial teams.

🇪🇺 Europe puts €3.8m behind cross-border health data: Three projects picked from 19 proposals under the EU-funded UNITE programme. CARDIO-HUB is building a “Cardio-Passport” so elderly heart failure patients can generate a standardised summary and share it with a clinician in another country. NEODATA+ is working on neonatal intensive care decision-making, and RAD-TRACK EU is tracking cumulative radiation exposure as patients move between imaging providers. UNITE’s trying to force a shift from isolated pilots to full-scale deployment, the road to which is paved with the bones of many who have come before them. But Wales has joined UNITE with £700k of its own, and there’s a route in for UK innovators, so that’s good.

🇺🇸 The US is paying nursing homes to get off paper: My Dad was a charge nurse for most of his career and in his retirement, infamously bought a nursing home. As the least trusting human being on earth when it comes to technology, he then took their brand new computer-based accounting system and painstakingly put it back all onto paper. Anyway, thankfully he’s no longer in any position of authority in healthcare and now there’s new legislation and funding to go one further and help nursing homes and home health providers adopt EHRs. In the UK, our new PM seems to care about the social care system which is good. I’d tell him that the US are fixing theirs with money while we keep not fixing ours with strategies, so perhaps take a leaf etc…

And finally…

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

Media, influencers, advertising and healthcare. That’s a box of frogs and an absolute disaster waiting to happen (already happening). I deep dive ASA rules, who’s breaking them, what healthtech companies can do to get ahead and what questions investors need to be asking before they put money in.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week I had the absolute legend, Yasir Sacranie, on the pod. He’s a pharmacist, content creator and founder of MicroPharm, the platform that continues to get thousands of trainee pharmacists through their registration exam.

This is epic. Tjasa talks to Emily Kate Genatowski, a historian who bought a humanoid robot and lived with it for over a year. Worth a listen if you've recently sat in a meeting where someone’s even slightly suggested that the social care workforce crisis is solved any time soon with robots.

Peter Birch recorded this one on the floor at BIO in San Diego, and the recurring theme is trial recruitment, which remains the bottleneck nobody has solved and everybody is now pointing AI at.

Given the MHRA news, if you’re interested, go back to my conversation with Jamie Cox, co-founder and CTO of Scarlet, which is Europe's only notified body specialising in software and AI medical devices (they certified TORTUS as UKCA Class IIa in June). Listening to it against this week's guidance is a slightly uncomfortable experience, but a very informative one.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Yes, that’s exactly who you think it is…

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.

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
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt 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.

TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.

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 💰

🏥 The entire executive team, Online NHS Trust (England): Medical director, chief nurse, chief people officer and chief financial officer, all open at once, ahead of a 2027 launch. This is the NHS’s first national digital-first trust, delivering planned care through the NHS App. You would be building an NHS organisation from a blank page, which happens roughly never. HTN’s write-up here if you want the candidate brief detail first.

Health Tech World Awards 2026, (deadline 14 August): Eight sponsored categories including Leader of the Year, AI Innovation and Startup of the Year. Judging 17 August to 28 September, winners announced 5 October.

🏆 HTN Now Awards 26/27: Open for entries. The Health Tech Awards 2026 are currently in judging, so that ship has sailed for this cycle so get your submissions in for the 2027 cohort now.

📣 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.

If you’ve been on Instagram recently and had the misfortune of clicking anything to do with GLP-1s, the algorithm now thinks you want one… and along with the companies selling them, that dynamic (dystopian) duo will stop at NOTHING until you get one.

People in my other world (comms/marketing/media) will know about the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA for short) and it’s meant to regulate all advertising, which is a “boil the ocean” type of remit in 2026. They ask influencers to put #ad on their posts, they ask for things to be removed if they’re in breach. I wouldn’t say it’s toothless, but it’s not feared.

Between that, humans’ innate drive to live forever, look good doing it, and the financial prizes at stake for companies, B2C (and to be honest, more B2B that you’d expect) healthcare marketing is an absolute sh*t show. If you recap the seven deadly sins and think about a campaign for a health product, it’s likely to be playing on a full house.

For more context on the issue here, in April, the ASA claimed a very odd victory, i.e. that they’d monitored 44 advertisers selling weight-loss treatments, identified around 900 ads likely to breach the rules across 38 of them, “taken enforcement action,” and “driven compliance" among monitored paid-for ads up to roughly 99%.

In theory, ok they’ve done their job, but the gate was clearly shut after the horse had bolted and it makes you wonder how many people that horse had run over before being recaptured. Further down the same report was a really big issue… non-paid content (especially influencer and affiliate advertising) presents a higher risk of non-compliance. A new, very dark grey area.

I’ve been thinking about this since I had Deborah Cohen on The Healthtech Podcast. She’s fantastic. A medically qualified investigative journalist, built the investigations unit at the BMJ, was science editor at ITV News, health correspondent at Newsnight, and has just published Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health, which has now been shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book of the Year.

We chatted about what this all means for clinicians, patients, healthtech companies… and it’s so important to understand if you’re building (or simply consuming) in this space.

The rules stop in a very specific place.

Deb has been regulated in her day jobs. As a broadcaster she answered to Ofcom on accuracy and fairness, and to defamation law if she gets a person wrong. But…

“YouTube’s not within that code, podcasts aren’t within that code.”

She’s right, and I even joke with guests on my podcast that “this isn’t regulated, you can say what you like.” My intent’s to reduce anxiety and have a laugh occasionally… but others’ intent is, frankly, to exploit the rules and instil fear to sell drugs.

Interestingly, the Media Act 2024 extends to something pretty close to Broadcasting Code standards for designated ‘Tier 1’ video-on-demand services, things like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, ITVX, Channel 4 On Demand etc.. But it obviously doesn’t touch the platforms like YouTube where most people actually encounter health content (ironically a mere click away on the same smart TV). And podcasts are absent from the Act entirely, which was a gap flagged in a parliamentary research briefing at the time.

Before researching this, I also didn’t know that Canada has brought podcasts into scope under its Online Streaming Act in 2023. So not only is it possible, but there’s precedent.

Deb likened the reactionary ASA activity to the (equal parts fun and infuriating) game of whack-a-mole and talked about a prescription-only migraine drug appearing in her own Instagram feed, promoted by Khloé Kardashian. She put it to Meta, who, predictably, declined to engage, and to Google, who said no rules had been broken.

The ASA’s position was that if the ad was intended for a US audience, the UK code may not apply. But it wasn’t obviously intended for a US audience. It used an American brand name, which, if you search it, returns UK pharmacies willing to prescribe it. Infuriating.

If you’re running a healthtech company, you should know this, but I’ll recap anyway… just in case. Britain bans direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines. In fact, most of the world does. But, it’s one of those bans that’s now really leaky in a world that’s moved on since it was written. It used to be that people bought literal ad space. Now the definition of ‘advertising’ is convoluted and exploitable.

So this is the escalation…

• Paid ads are monitored and now largely compliant ✅

• Influencer content is harder to catch ⚠️

• Affiliate content is harder still ❌

In February, the ASA reached the bottom rung and ruled against ordinary members of the public who had posted about weight-loss injections using referral links and discount codes, on behalf of all the big online pharmacy names. The ASA’s investigations manager said affiliate marketing is not a loophole. A good catch.

Then I saw an Instagram ad, aimed at employers, arguing that if your staff take GLP-1s they will take less time off and your bottom line will improve. I can’t find it now - hopefully’s it’s gone forever from the internet, but it did make me wonder how on earth we got here, how we stop these floodgates, and even what is my role in all this at the intersection of healthcare and media?

While I can’t find that one, ads like these are all over the place 👇

Deb mentioned that the origin of the productivity ad could have even been the government. There’s interest in Whitehall in GLP-1s and productivity, she said, but, again, the evidence isn’t yet there. In 2024 Lilly committed £279m alongside a real-world study run with Health Innovation Manchester. Five years, three thousand participants and designed to measure employment status and days off sick.

Regardless of the results, the state is spending five years and £279m trying to find out the truth. There’s currently no empirical evidence that these drugs improve non-clinical economic outcomes, yet this advertiser sold employers a clear benefit. And that’s without even entering any morality debate.

It gets worse…

Read more

Sup healthtechies.

A fun toilet seat ‘sittable’ device, the 3rd health secretary of the summer, Bryan Johnson has cloned himself and is keeping said clone in a petri dish (apparently). Also, the next SomX event waiting list goes up and it’s ok, there is good science and tech happening - Anthropic crowned the winners of a hackathon that had actual lab data behind it. Onwards.

News Bites 🥪

🚽 The smartest seat in the house: Casana has raised $46m to make "sittables" the next wearables, which is a sentence I can't believe I'm writing but here we are. The $199 “Smart Seat” tracks blood pressure, heart rate, O₂ sats and respiratory rate every time you sit down. No USB charging nonsense, no syncing, no problem. They’re explicitly targeting the over-65s who won’t wear a ring but will, absolutely, use a toilet. Now… we joke, because toilet humour is obviously hilarious, but this is built around doing absolutely nothing differently, which, given how bad humans are at adherence to anything, is ideal. If it only picks up what’s actionable and doesn’t cause additional stress about meaningless metrics, I think I’m a fan.

🏛️ Yvette Cooper becomes the NHS’s third boss in nine weeks: James Murray was in the job for two months. He replaced Wes Streeting, who resigned in May. Now Yvette Cooper’s in. I’ll defer to the NHS experts over the next few days to analyse what this is likely to mean (some opinions here), but Yvette said it’s an honour and wants to improve maternity services and “take forward plans for social care.” Kings Fund CEO gave a hint at the chaos about to hit her inbox, saying all this is urgent… steering through the largest NHS reorganisation in over a decade, implementing a sweep of plans and strategies already set in motion, life sciences sector plan, capital plan, cancer plan and upcoming workforce plan. Apparently they’ll all need Yvette Cooper’s immediate attention. Ah yes, the old ‘your incompetence is now my emergency.’ Welcome to having an NHS inbox.

🧬 Bryan Johnson’s cloned himself (ish): The longevity guru, freshly diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, has now announced he's "cloned" himself. Alright, firstly, he hasn't, what he's actually done is have his blood cells reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Reassuringly, that isn’t a miniature Bryan gestating in a petri dish, but you can tell he’s fully leaning into dystopian language and outrage as a marketing tactic (which is working). And, by the way, he hasn’t got an illegal offshore lab doing anything too rogue (I don’t think). iPSCs are from Nobel-winning science and they’re a proper platform for testing drugs against your own biology and, eventually, maybe growing autologous tissue. BUT there's a canyon between what he’s doing and a transplantable organ, and so far there's no published data, no named lab, and no assay certificate to say he's cleared even the first hurdle.*

🧬 Claude Gets a Lab Coat: Anthropic has gone all in on the life sciences with Claude Science, an "AI workbench for scientists" that stitches together databases, notebooks and cluster jobs that researchers currently struggle-through by hand, with a reviewer agent checking the citations, summing as it goes. To show it off they ran a global hackathon with the Gladstone Institutes, and yes, ok, they’re weekend prototypes rather than being clinic-ready, but the winners show what AI capabilities can really do for us in the near future… e.g. NCypher hunts the non-coding DNA behind an almost-always-fatal childhood brain cancer, and Lazarus resurrects abandoned research code, in one case fixing a bug that had sat untouched for 15 years.

🤖 Bunkerhill Health raises $55M to let hospitals build their own AI agents: This is the global direction of travel and you can tell because all the big names are all in on it. Khosla-led Series B with Sequoia, Felicis, Optum Ventures and Y Combinator all staying in for Carebricks, a platform that lets health systems build and deploy their own clinical AI agents instead of buying one point-solution at a time. More than 20 agents are apparently already live at the University of Texas Medical Branch, including one that triaged a patient straight into an emergency triple bypass. Sounds great. Yes, outcome figures are company-supplied, from a single institution, and only some of the underlying algorithms are FDA-cleared, and yes, agentic AI making decisions and taking actions inside a hospital is a liability nightmare, but we can’t complain about a lack of workforce capacity, then complain about the solution just because it’s hard to figure out. This is why we all work here. Let’s figure this out.

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

This week’s is an exploration into “can we autonomously deliver primary care?” Because according to one company in the US… “fully autonomous primary care is ready to be launched.” Expect a deep dive into LLM capabilities, knowledge graphs and a critical look at how healthtech companies claim their AI capabilities.

What to listen to 🔊

This week I had Professor Reza Razavi, Professor of Paediatric Cardiovascular Science at King's College London and CEO of Fraiya, an AI ultrasound software company onto the pod. His daughter had a near-fatal, undiagnosed heart condition as a newborn, which set him on a path to close the gap between the 50% of congenital heart defects currently missed and a detection rate approaching 97-98%, with AI.

Dr Cosima Gretton on the move from clinical medicine into product, running LAMP testing at NHS Test & Trace, and now building the infrastructure at Our Future Health to recontact 2.5 million participants. Her argument that product thinking and medical training pull in opposite directions is worth the 39 minutes alone.

Not strictly healthtech, but a very strong 17 minutes from TED Health on why the boring (sleep, a proper chat with a friend) does more for you than the flashy. Psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, makes the case that our relationships aren't just nice to have, they're a genuine health input. Worth a listen if you spend your days building digital tools and occasionally forget that connection is the OG.

Events 📅

Get ready for this one. Save the date, 2nd September, 6pm. And yes, that’s exactly who you think it is👇

NXGN Season 2: The Future of Healthcare
🗓️ 30 July
🇬🇧 London.
Welcome to the Season 2 opener from NXGN, with a candid community evening on where healthcare is heading across the whole patient journey. Founders, clinicians and investors, minus the polished stage-speak.

Healthtech Talks: Will the NHS waste the AI moment?
🗓️ 2 September
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
We’re back, and this time we’re bringing Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Hunt, 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, to get to the nub of where AI can tangibly make a difference in secondary care, where it will disappoint, and what it would really take for the health service to seize this moment.

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.

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
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt 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.

TechBio UK 2026
📅 13 October
📍 🇬🇧 Kings Place, London.
The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, uniting biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders.

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.

Jobs 💰

🐢 Commercial Director, TORTUS (London): TORTUS want someone to own go-to-market across the UK and EU and deliver 2-3x revenue growth. If you can sell clinical safety as hard as TORTUS talks about it, this is the one.

🔬 Digital Innovation Deputy Portfolio Lead, UCLH: UCLH's Digital Innovation Hub is after someone to get research out of the lab and into use across the trust. You'd own a portfolio of innovation projects, sit between the academics and the clinicians, and be the person deciding what gets prioritised, delivered and killed. Band 8b (£75k to £86k inclusive of HCAS), 21 months fixed term, London. Closes 26th July (today!)

🩺 Advanced Nurse Practitioner / Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Doccla (Hybrid, UK): Doccla runs virtual wards for a huge chunk of NHS ICBs. This is the clinical seat inside that machine, remote monitoring at genuine scale.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

📣 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 ✌🏼

James’ editor notes

* Biology lesson incoming… Every cell in your body has the same DNA, but a skin cell "knows" it's a skin cell and a neuron "knows" it's a neuron. In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka worked out that you could wipe that identity by forcing 4 genes back on (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, now universally called the Yamanaka factors), which resets a mature cell to an embryonic-like blank slate that can, in principle, become any tissue in the body. That's what an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC or iPS cell) is. Yamanaka got the Nobel for it in 2012 and iPSCs are now everywhere in drug testing and regenerative medicine. Worth noting 1 of the 4 factors, c-Myc, is a well-known oncogene, which is a big part of why turning reprogrammed cells into safe, functioning organs is tricky without them turning cancerous.

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.

Then they get into the exit itself. Why sell a profitable, bootstrapped, 100% owned business at all, why Pastest (a family business that has supported doctors through exams since 1972), and what the next two years look like for Tommy inside a bigger company. Tommy also gives a refreshingly candid, practical walkthrough of how anyone can estimate a private company's sale price using Companies House data, typical industry margins and EBITDA multiples. James returns the favour with the real numbers behind Healthtech Pigeon and where SomX is placing its bets.

Along the way: the doctor creator economy and the four levels of monetisation, why vertically integrated creators win, how AI now lets a two person team do the work of ten, the death of legacy media and the rise of niche distribution, the case for building in public (and why Tommy didn't), and why he is still practising medicine two and a half days a week through all of it.

Connect with Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-perkins-138864149

Learn more about Medics' Money: https://medicsmoney.co.uk

Medics' Money x Pastest: https://www.pastest.com/pages/medics-money

Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.com

Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon: www.healthtechpigeon.com

Get in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.com

This podcast was brought to you by SomX - https://somx.health

Resources:

Medics' Money - https://medicsmoney.co.uk

Pastest acquires Medics' Money (BusinessCloud) - https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/edtech-pastest-acquires-financial-platform-medics-money/

Pastest - https://www.pastest.com

Companies House - https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

GP Bullhound - https://www.gpbullhound.com

Hello healthtech friends. Another fun week in healthtech, plus I’m keen to get some info from you on the new NHS online for some analytical content, so I’m trying out the survey feature.

Enjoy. 🫡

News Bites 🥪

💰 Neko Health raises $700M for preventative healthcare: Healthtech’s really hotting up, honestly. Last week it was acquisitions, this week it’s the biggest ever raise from someone I’ve shaken the hand of and chatted to on the podcast. Hjalmar Nilsonne (and of course Daniel Ek of Spotify) have closed a $700M Series C for their preventative health outfit. If you don’t know what they do, it’s a <60 minute, £299 human-body-MOT with bloods and enough sensors to make you feel reassuringly surveilled. No full body MRI, they ‘only measure what’s actionable’ and are actively building bridges to the NHS to create and share data / insights. If you want a very deep dive on them and the prevention sector as a whole, I’ve written about preventative health and Neko specifically for Pigeon Insider (Part 1 - The Inverse Prevention Law and Part 2 - Can a private company drag the NHS toward prevention?). TLDR below*.

🚨 GPhC launches a fake-pharmacy crackdown as oral Wegovy lands: This is wild. The General Pharmaceutical Council’s kicked off a campaign urging anyone buying medicines online to check the pharmacy is actually registered, because in the last 12 months, criminals cloned 1/10 pharmacy websites to sell fake medicines. With oral semaglutide tablets arriving in UK pharmacies this month, chief exec Kathie Cashell’s warning is ‘a pill is far easier to counterfeit than an injection pen.’ As someone pretty clued up in healthtech, I didn’t realise any of this - 97% (!) of pharmacies surveyed already expect a spike in fake weight-loss products doing the rounds. The GPhC have a ten-point checklist, a register you can search in about thirty seconds, and a House of Commons roundtable behind the scenes trying to get platforms and enforcement rowing in the same direction.

💜 The Lowdown finds a home at Vira Health: More acquisition positivity. Alice Pelton’s nine-year-old contraception review platform (built after a dinner-table rant about the total absence of real data on what women actually experience on the pill) has been acquired by Vira Health who do healthcare support for employees. As the story goes, Alice rang Vira co-founder Andrea Berchowitz back in 2019 for advice, and now The Lowdown’s community, content and unfiltered-voices dataset fold into Vira’s proposition. As they say… ask for money and you’ll get advice, ask for advice and you might just get your women’s health platform acquired. Congrats to all.

🧬 Synnovis and SOPHiA GENETICS bring blood-test cancer diagnosis to the NHS: Under NHS England’s “blood test first” push, Synnovis is now running the MSK-ACCESS liquid biopsy test to detect actionable genomic mutations from a single blood draw. It’s already supporting roughly 400 lung and breast cancer patients a month, with the AI parsing circulating tumour DNA to flag treatment options up to two weeks faster than the old route. The plan is to scale to around 7,000 patients a year, close to 1/3 of all English lung and breast cancer tests. Remember… amongst all the ‘difficult to adopt’ stories in healthtech and software, biotech and devices continues to crack on and make impact.

⚖️ NICE decides healthtech deserves the same treatment as medicines: Expanding out of medicines, NICE is now doing its thing for devices, diagnostics and digital tools under the new National HealthTech Access Programme. That means a small set of high-impact technologies are going to get reimbursed and rolled out across the whole health service rather than living or dying by which trust you happen to live near. First through the door is a capsule sponge test for oesophageal cancer (delightfully named "pill on a string") and AI pathology tools for prostate and breast cancer. Let’s be honest, the fact we have postcode lottery is embarrassing so I’m all for anything that gets rid of it. Of course, a NICE yes has never guaranteed anyone buys anything, but let’s celebrate another positive step.

And finally…

😴 Your sleep tracker might be gaslighting you into a worse day: This is amazing. Researchers told participants they'd slept great or terrible (entirely made up), then ran them through cognitive tests. The ones that were told they'd slept badly performed worse. The ones that were told they'd slept brilliantly performed better. Slightly uncomfortable truth for the entire wearables industry… if people wake up feeling fine and glance at a bad sleep score, they’ll immediately feel awful and the world is hardly a better place. Slight caveat, it's a decade-old study that I only found this week from someone posting it on Instagram of all places, it’s small and cognition-specific, so ok let's not over-claim. But… as we’re under pressure to strap ever more sensors to ourselves and hand our mornings over to a number, the “nocebo” risk is very real and under-studied. I’d love to see a 2026 version of this experiment.

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

This week’s is an exploration into “can we autonomously deliver primary care?” Because according to one company in the US… “fully autonomous primary care is ready to be launched.” Expect a deep dive into LLM capabilities, knowledge graphs and a critical look at how healthtech companies claim their AI capabilities.

Subscribe now

Survey Time 📝

We’re trying out some audience participation this week.

I want to do some content on NHS Online for you all and I’m keen on your thoughts.

Three questions
Select 1 answer for each
It’s anonymous

What to listen to 🔊

Jessica and I chatted to Dr Mustafa Ghafouri, the GP-turned-builder we mentioned in this newsletter a couple of weeks back who’s behind hospitalwaits.co.uk, the epic tool that lets patients see which hospitals actually have the shortest waits for their procedure. Fascinating chat. He also talks really openly about how he built it, so if you want the 101 on Claude Code, I recommend queueing it up.

Niall Boyce and Chloe Wilson put AI triage and ambient scribes under proper scrutiny, including the risk that a tidy-looking symptom gets quietly downgraded by an algorithm.

Amsterdam's Philippe Habets (EvidenceHunt) argues OpenEvidence's EU and UK exit was less about the AI Act and more about an ad-and-data business model European clinicians were never going to trust. Spicy.

Rock Health's Megan Zweig on where the money is actually flowing in 2026, and why "strongest quarter since the pandemic" hides some very lumpy deal concentration. A useful counterweight if your funding bites are looking a touch euphoric.

Events 📅

Startup Lab x Specialist Briefings: AI Innovation vs. Regulation
🗓️ 22 July
🇬🇧 Hale House, London.
A panel on whether UK regulation is actually helping digital health and AI, or quietly strangling it. The eternal question, and one worth arguing about in person.

NXGN Season 2: The Future of Healthcare
🗓️ 30 July
🇬🇧 London.
The Season 2 opener from NXGN: a candid community evening on where healthcare is heading across the whole patient journey. Founders, clinicians and investors, minus the polished stage-speak.

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.

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
🇪🇸 Grand Hyatt 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.

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

Opportunity 🕵️‍♀️

AI Clinical Evaluation Workshop
📅 Thursday 13th August, 6:00–8:00pm (UK)
🇬🇧 Waterloo, London
Invite-only session for clinicians (apply at the link), chaired by Microsoft's Global CMO, who'll open with remarks on AI's shifting role in healthcare. You’ll independently put multiple AI tools through real-world clinical tasks using synthetic patient records, which feeds into a comparative study report earmarked for publication, with participants acknowledged, so it's a proper evaluation. If you're a clinician and curious how the tools actually stack up, very much worth applying.

Jobs 💰

🔎 Physician, Neko Health (New York): Spending $700M takes a village so no surprises that they’re hiring. Now in New York. The work is preventive medicine at volume, so reading structured scan results, catching things early, nudging members before symptoms turn up. Hard to think of a more talked-about clinic to practise in.

🏥 Clinical Lead, Concentric (Australia): Concentric’s UK digital consent platform (30,000+ clinicians, 40,000 patients a week) wants its first Australian clinical face. Someone who can win over sceptical hospital groups one demo at a time and provide feedback on what needs to change for Australian practice. Part-time is genuinely on the table if you want to keep one foot in clinic.

🔬 Senior Clinical Researcher & Data Scientist, Voy (UK): Voy wants a clinician who thinks like a data scientist, someone who can take messy real-world GLP-1, testosterone and menopause data and turn it into publication-grade evidence. If you've ever wanted your causal inference skills to actually move a pharma partnership rather than sit in a drawer, this is that job.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

📣 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 ✌🏼

James’ editor notes

* TLDR of the Pigeon Insider piece on the prevention space… I think progress in prevention is going to be made by those willing to tolerate the discomfort of several conflicting truths. Simultaneously, we have an obvious Inverse Prevention Law, no wide-spread, state-led prevention at scale, operational and technological private sector innovation attracting billions in funding, services like Neko that sit between an NHS Health Check and concierge medicine and two sides that can learn from and help each other if they collaborate in good faith. If you want to know more about Neko specifically, go for Part 2 of my deep dives.

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.

It’s funny what turns up in the media and what doesn’t.

Healthtech really isn’t great for this. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only companies that existed were making consumer wearables. One of the best things about starting Healthtech Pigeon has been surfacing lesser known, lesser (let’s just say) ‘appreciated’ news. Here’s a corker…

In February, Mount Sinai ran the first independent safety test of ChatGPT Health. Among genuine emergencies (and remember, OpenAI fields questions from about 40 million people a day), it under-triaged 52% of cases. It looked at diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) and impending respiratory failure and suggested people wait a day or two before seeing anyone. Cool…

Then a month later, Curai Health (US-based virtual primary and urgent care company) published a serious, real-world study of its own system across 2,379 patient ‘encounters,’ and used it to argue that AI is now ready to run defined parts of a primary care visit without a doctor in the loop. Really?

If you want the horses mouth (abstract)…

Their case is that an engineered stack with hard-coded safety checks around the language model is now safe enough to go at a set of common physical conditions, and the FDA’s invited to rewrite its rules to allow it… Interesting.

Now, if you’ve read Pigeon for a while, I can hear you typing “hang on, you were perfectly happy with the likes of Limbic that have a similar stack for patient-facing mental health triage. Why bring this up?” Good question. Yes, I was, I still am. When it comes to patient-facing AI, I’ve learned that detail and nuance is absolutely everything, so allow me to explain…

When AI does one bounded job, i.e. sorting people into the conditions, and it’s built on structured instruments like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, it augments a clinician’s assessment, and you earn Class IIa medical device status through a regulatory route that already exists. However, when you make a diagnostic call across open-ended primary care, arguing the doctor can step out of the loop… and ask the FDA to build it a new pathway and fresh liability law for when there’s no clinician left to hold responsible, it’s… well… kinda different.

In mental health triage there's usually a clinician downstream and time to correct a miss, and the AI runs inside a supervised pathway, not instead of one.

In physical medicine in primary and urgent care, you might not get a clinician downstream or the gift of time before a patient deteriorates. DKA might present initially as a stomach bug, an ectopic might look like a UTI for a few hours, and the window to catch these before a rapid decline can be very short.

I’m not actually arguing that humans are better than AI at catching that kind of thing or vice versa (although, I’m pretty sure if we were choosing a reality it would be AI+humans rather than either, alone), I’m saying that when a doctor gets it wrong, there's a history you can reconstruct, a duty of care, a regulator, and a coroner who can ask why those questions and not others. Take the clinician out, as is being suggested here, and, ok the error rate might not change, but everything built to account for the error’s gone. What you’re left with is very weird at best, and I’ll let you add a word to describe the situation that, god forbid, you’re bereaved.

So here we are. Tens of millions of people using LLMs to decide whether their symptoms are an emergency. Companies publishing papers arguing they’re ready to take the clinician out of the loop for defined categories of care, asking regulators to ‘please sort.’ And, I’m just wondering… who actually decided that the autonomous diagnosis road was the one anyone wanted us to travel down?

Well… I need to show you something…

Read more

Hi healthtech friends,

Big week for AI in both directions. A £10bn tech overhaul (AI triage and ambient scribes going properly national in the UK)….. but also the first complaints about doctors using AI badly have started to come through. Interesting times.

Also, NXGN USA are looking for committee members. If you think you’re a next generation healthtech leader and you’re based on the East coast, scroll on if you want to build the community with a budget 🇺🇸🗽

Don’t like reading? Prefer digesting Pigeon through the ears? Jessica and Anna from SomX on last week’s stories here 👇🏼

News Bites 🥪

🏛️ NHS accelerates AI rollout, with a new triage tool in the NHS App and ambient scribes going national: To save you reading the press release, the 3 points in this are… (1) £10bn funding over three years, (2) an AI triage tool inside the NHS App (200,000 patients this year, everyone by April 2028) and (3) a national push on scribes, starting in outpatients. The Sussex GP trial behind the triage tool cut phone queuing by 29%, which is fine, but does beg the question “are we optimising something (phone queueing) which shouldn’t even exist?” There’s a “£41bn total benefits over a decade” figure, which is said confidently, and with the expected level of irritating ambiguity to be completely justified whatever actually happens. I’m clearly going with a cynical vibe today, but does “£41bn total benefits” honestly mean anything to anyone? Just tell me if I can get an appointment and if my HCP can see their kids before they’re in bed.

⚖️ First complaints made over clinician use of AI, HSJ reveals: I mean… this was clearly just a matter of time. Absolutely nobody is surprised to hear that the GMC received 8 complaints against 8 individual doctors in 2025, plus 6 more against 5 doctors in the first half of 2026. What’s surprising is how low the numbers are to be honest. That’s not a slur on doctors (though, the thought that my med school mates are all now consultants is outrageous given the Facebook albums that they, and I, both know exist), it’s just a comment on how much (realistically) AI is used without generating complaints. The GMC’s line is that “doctors are responsible for their own decisions when using AI” and that’s clearly being tested in practice. Given the NHS just committed to scaling AI notetaking nationally (see above), this number’s likely to increase beyond a rounding error fairly quickly. Are you a clinician and unsure what to use on your patients? “Medical device or put it in the bin” is a pretty solid rule.

✅ NICE gives draft green light to two non-invasive endometriosis tests, rejects a third: A positive tech story for you. Endotest (a saliva-based microRNA test from French biotech Ziwig) and EndoSure (a gut-electrical-signal sensor pad test) have been recommended for a three-year NHS evidence-gathering period. A third contender, DotLab’s blood test DotEndo, didn’t make the cut, with NICE saying “they should’ve put Endo at the start of their name.” Joke. They actually said it “requires more research” first. Good to know things are reaching market given that average time to diagnosis for endometriosis is currently >9 years. And good to know things that need more evidence aren’t actually reaching market. Consultation on the draft guidance runs until 27th July.

🧠 Mindstep acquired by Onebright Group: Acquisition-fever is hitting the sector. Mindstep’s digital screening, triage and adaptive self-care tools are being folded into Onebright, the largest private outpatient mental health and neurodevelopmental provider across the UK and Denmark. I first met Hamzah (cofounder) a couple of years ago when he came on my podcast and you’ll be glad to know that this is another example of the good guys winning. We (SomX) also did a very cool project with Mindstep, filming Johnny Wilkinson talking about 6 mental health themes for their in-app content. Great causes all round. Congrats to Mindstep.

🩺 Wellpoint Health (Well.Me) acquires Cognitant Group and the Healthinote patient education platform: And another… Well.Me’s health screening kiosks (blood pressure, BMI, cardiovascular risk, the works) now sit alongside Cognitant’s patient education and adherence tools, built for NHS, pharma and life sciences. Screening, plus education, plus population health analytics, all under one roof. Founder, Dr Tim Ringrose (a familiar face from the NHS Innovation Accelerator alumni network) stays on to build out the AI-enabled health journeys roadmap. Not saying every company that works with SomX gets acquired, but you know… these two did. Anyway, arguably the worst entrepreneurial move of all time is only mentioning SomX once every 6 months in the biggest newsletter in UK healthtech, but here we go... SomX does comms for healthtech companies. We do it well, so buy things off us if you want. There. Box ticked until Christmas.

💊 3D-printed pills get a €12M vote of confidence: 3D printing? How very 2015 of you. Oddly satisfying to see it back in a post-LLM world. Anyway, Helsinki's CurifyLabs raised €12M Series A - they sell pharmacies a system that 3D-prints personalised medicines on-site. They have software that sets the exact dose and formulation, and a printer builds each tablet from GMP-made base materials and it’s about 9x faster than by hand. Personalised paediatric and geriatric drug dosing is definitely in the ‘unglamorous’ bucket of problems to solve in healthtech, but hey, heck of a market size and plenty of impact to be made.

If you’re an analyst and want to get ahead of the curve with valuing the latest investment deals, I suggest picking this one up.

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

Last week’s… Getting AI regulated. A not so practical guide.

I go through changes happening to the regulatory landscape and how tech stacks with AI and LLMs within them are getting regulated… and continue to iterate and keep getting regulated, which hasn’t really been possible until now.

Subscribe now

What to listen to 🔊

This week it’s Jamie Fox, co-Founder and CTO of Scarlet, Europe's only notified body specialised in software and AI medical devices. He built AI triage software at Babylon, which led him and co-founder James Dewar (also ex-Babylon, also previously a pod guest) to build a brand new notified body from the ground up, for iterative software… like AI 👀. Why does regulation create artificial bottlenecks for founders? What does it actually mean to certify an LLM as a medical device?… All in here.

Jennifer Dixon sits down with Ricardo Baptista Leite (CEO of Health AI) and Professor Alastair Denniston to dig into the newly formed National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare. Timely, given this week's news.

The workforce "boom and bust," why covid cost the NHS £20bn in lost care, and how the health service recovers while public spending stays squeezed.

Events 📅

Health Creators Connect (a SomX event, in partnership with Micropharm)
📅 13 July, 7 to 9pm
📍Atom Coffee, London W3
We (SomX), alongside MicroPharm, are bringing together the people who quietly run the UK’s healthcare content machine for an intimate, invitation-only evening. It’s off the record, it’s honest, it’s real and it’s a heck of a lot of valuable info if you’re a creator. Jessica from SomX is giving candid talk on the actual business of it - negotiating, working with brands, cash versus equity, hiring, getting paid properly, then a live AMA. If you make, shape or fund health content in the UK, get your application in. All will be revealed on why SomX can confidently talk on this, too… 🤫

Startup Lab x Specialist Briefings: AI Innovation vs Regulation, Is the UK Falling Behind or Playing It Safe?
📅 22 July
📍 🇬🇧 Hale House, London
UCLPartners and RADIANT CERSI team up for what’s shaping up to be the most on-the-nose session of the month, given everything above. If you want to argue about whether the UK’s AI regulatory approach is cautious or just slow, this is your room.

Pangaea Data: Transforming Neurology with AI Workshop
📅 14 July
📍 🇬🇧 London
A hands-on look at applying AI to neurology workflows. Useful if you’re building or buying in this space and want practical detail rather than a vendor pitch deck.

Digital Health Summer Schools
📅 16 to 17 July
📍 🇬🇧 UK
Two days with NHS CIOs, CCIOs and CNIOs, with three national digital leaders already confirmed. Less polished-keynote, more how-do-we-actually-do-this, which is the useful kind.

WHH Women’s Health Horizons London Autumn Summit
📅 22 September
📍 🇬🇧 Emirates Stadium, London
A way off yet, but given this week’s endometriosis and women’s health funding stories, worth having on the radar early.

ABHI UK HealthTech Conference 2026
📅 7 October
📍 🇬🇧 London
Two days covering the full regulatory-to-market-access pipeline, MHRA early engagement, NICE pathways, procurement, the lot. Early bird pricing ends today, so if it’s on your list, this is the day.

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

Jobs & opportunities 🕵️‍♀️

AI Clinical Evaluation Workshop
📅 Thursday 13th August, 6:00–8:00 PM BST
🇬🇧 Waterloo, London
Invite-only session for clinicians (apply at the link), chaired by Microsoft's Global CMO, who'll open with remarks on AI's shifting role in healthcare. You’ll independently put multiple AI tools through real-world clinical tasks using synthetic patient records, which feeds into a comparative study report earmarked for publication, with participants acknowledged, so it's a proper evaluation. If you're a clinician and curious how the tools actually stack up, very much worth applying.

🎯 Offscript finds you the buyers that LinkedIn can’t: LinkedIn still doesn’t have a “healthtech” category, so if you’re selling into the NHS your best-fit buyers vanish somewhere between job titles, industry tags and keyword hacks. And let’s be honest, Sales Navigator and Apollo only get you so far. OffScript kills the filters. You describe who you’re after in plain English (”commercial leads at Series A digital health companies selling into the NHS”) and one search runs across every network at once. Every UK healthcare provider mapped and buying-intent signals layered on top. A new bit of plumbing for a lean BD team.

🩺 Head of Clinical Innovation, Doccla: Doccla runs virtual wards and remote monitoring for 60%+ of NHS ICBs, fresh off a £35m Series B. This is the senior clinical seat where product, regulation and evidence meet - clinical sign-off on features, DCB0129/0160 safety, the MDR evidence strategy. Needs a licensed UK GP with digital health chops. A proper frontier role for a clinician who wants authority over what ships.

🩺 NHS England is hiring a Clinical Lead for digital clinical safety: A registered clinician to lead NHS England's Digital Clinical Governance Framework, own clinical safety (DCB0129/0160) and manage a team of informaticians. Band 8c (£79.5k–£91.6k) or Medical Leader 1, fixed term to March 2027, any NHSE office. Your chance to stop bad tech reaching the bedside.

🇺🇸🗽 NXGN USA is growing

The US arm of the next-gen healthtech and biotech community is expanding its committee. If you’re an early-career founder, clinician or operator stateside and want a seat at the table to organise events and community (with a budget), message me and I’ll forward it onto Aakash and Athena.

📣 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.