Hi friends,
This week: healthtech funding dips in Q1 2023, an earthquake in digital pharmacy, and join us for a game of ‘Which is it? healthtech company or tasty appetiser?’
News Bites 🥪
🦯 App adopts OpenAI as digital assistant for the blind - Finally, a genuinely beneficial-to-society, practical use for GPT-4 that isn’t just writing questionable jokes for a pigeon themed newsletter*.
🗒️ Notes on Disparity from a Female CEO - Is it depressing that articles like this need to be written? yes. Is it necessary? yes. Should biotech investors do better? absolutely….and Vineeta Tripathi’s suggestions are a great place to start.
💊 Digital pharmacy player Phlo snaps up UK arm of US-based unicorn Truepill - Truepill’s UK operations + Phlo = a match made in pharmacy heaven. Pigeon once spent a lovely Sunday Afternoon in pharmacy heaven. Maybe I’ll tell you about it someday. [What are you on about? Just call it an ‘earthquake in the UK digital pharmacy landscape’ and get on with the newsletter - Ed.]
⚕️ Closing the data gaps in women’s health - McKinsey puts together a fine long read, and this piece on the role of data in women’s health outcomes is no exception.
🏎️ AWS confirms healthcare accelerator startup programme participants - For healthtech aficionados, many of the names in the AWS healthcare accelerator will be familiar, but only ‘Momo’ and ‘Squid’ will make you crave a trip to your nearest Nepali restaurant.
🤝 6 megadeals made up 40% of digital health funding in Q1 as smaller startups face rough waters - If Pigeon were being flippant, he’d say an alternative headline could be ‘digital health funding normalises at 2019 levels’. But Pigeon isn’t being flippant, and in the aftermath of SVB and with further challenges on the horizon, all he can say is: keep on flapping, folks.
🕶️ NHS launches groundbreaking XR training programme - GPs and mental health trainees, say hello to Stacey, a helpful AR training tool that will help you engage with and support mothers experiencing peri-mental health conditions. Sadly, at time of writing, there’s no equivalent tool to help you understand whatever’s going on inside Pigeon’s brain.
🖨️ Hewitt recommends NHSE invite ICSs to identify digital and data leaders - Government-commissioned reviews are normally like Easter eggs. You wait ages for one to arrive and when it does, it looks delicious, ends up being entirely hollow and leaves you with a sick feeling when you’ve finished**. Pigeon promises that the Hewitt review is different.
What to listen to*** 🔊
🥼 The Business of Healthcare Podcast #235 War Stories & Lucky Breaks with Gus Kennedy - Tara interviews Hero Health’s Gus Kennedy about building and delivering a software solution to streamline the patient booking process, and why it’s tough to deliver tech that supports both clinicians and patients.
💉 The Scrubbed In podcast E125: Building the World’s First Digital Clinic for Surgery - Dr Robbie Huddleston & Dr Matt Beatty share their journey from leaving medicine to cofounding Surgery Hero.
Events 📅
🔐 Decoding the Future of Women - A meeting place for brilliant minds to learn, get inspired and co-create, slap bang in the middle of London Tech Week.
🌍 Digital Health World Congress - a veritable digital health smorgasbord is taking place in London in May, with Huma, AstraZeneca, Google and Oracle all set to grace the stage.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🧑🏫 Digital Health Leadership Programme DHLP - Do you want to “become an expert influencer and the driving force behind strategic, large scale, digital change and transformation across health and social care”? Sorry, the role of Chief Pigeon is taken - but we suppose this NHS programme is as good an alternative as any.
🧪 Director of Life Sciences & CEO of MedCity, London & Partners - This role sounds like a lot of work and requires the successful candidate to make ‘Powerful Connections’. We also hear they grant any favour asked of them on the day of their daughter’s wedding.
🔥 Community Manager, Health Foundry - Try to dispel your visions of molten steel, iron ore and ‘smelting’****, Health Foundry is actually a great environment to be a healthtech startup, and a lovely place to work.
🤷 Events Manager, Accurx - Pigeon has lost track of whether the R in Accurx is supposed to be upper-case or lower case. If you join the team, please DM us to confirm.
🎨 Product Designer - User centric, Flo Health - A chance to make a great app work even better? What are you waiting for?
💰 Head of Sales, Lantum - Quite a few healthcare organisations already trust Lantum’s workforce and rostering solutions. Your job would be to make sure all the rest trust them too. Feeling up to the challenge?
*what’s more up for debate here? That this newsletter could be written by an AI or that it has a societal benefit?
**and on the topic of reviews into systems conducted by people who used to be in charge of that system, Pigeon is excited to announce we’ve been invited to contribute to the Hancock Review of fax machine usage in whatever ICSs are called by the time of publication, coming June 2035.
*** There’s no Pigeon podcast this week. We felt like we’d been spoiling you all too much and thought a week off might make you appreciate us more.
****no, us neither.