Hi friends,
This week: A new AI assurance framework, most people DON’T want to go to hospital, and regulatory barriers? What regulatory barriers?
News Bites 🥪
😱 Huma Granted Class II Clearance By FDA For Its Disease-Agnostic Platform - Surprising? Yes; Confounding? Also yes; Impressive? Absolutely. All of Pigeon’s regulatory friends are talking about this FDA decision, which leaves Huma in a literal league of their own when it comes to disease management. If Pigeon seems just a little too enthusiastic about this news…don’t worry about it. [Thanks for the Mangoes, Dan* - Ed.]
⌗ NHSE and HDR UK launch survey on adoption of standardised data model - Know the difference between your federated data platform, secure data environments, trusted research environments and now your Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Models? This survey is for you – but to be honest, if you know what ALL of these are, you probably knew about this survey already.
✅ “Building and maintaining trust is crucial to realising the benefits of AI” – CDEI publishes portfolio of AI assurance techniques - Using AI in healthcare? The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (a nice little govt number that knows a few things about data) says trust is key. If, like Pigeon, your first thought was ‘well duh?’, then keep reading – the CDEI framework for assuring AI tools could be the standard to meet going forward.
🏃🏻♂️ Majority of public happy to use health technology to avoid going into hospital, new research shows - While Pigeon imagines only the most risk-averse people out there would prefer hospital to wearing a neat little monitoring device, this research demonstrates just how much acceptance of digital health is increasing. Come for the healthtech, stay for the Pigeon-themed newsletter.
📟 NHS running on pagers four years after promise to scrap them - 79000 pagers, one manufacturer, £400 each. Assuming all the old ones have broken, and estimating the ones remaining are all less than 14 years old, that’s £31.6m spent on pagers since Whatsapp was invented….and yet Whatsapp is now ‘proper banned’ in the NHS, while pagers clearly aren’t (yet).
🐺 Start-ups left hanging in EU medical device regulation snarl-up - Pigeon’s sad to see yet more reports that European medtech regulation is driving startups away. We hope that, in the UK at least, last week’s IDAP announcement goes some way toward closing the gap.
🟰 Achieving health equity in life sciences - While not strictly healthtech per se, the findings of this Deloitte report on health equity are a must-read for digital health and biotech founders, particularly as those markets grow and companies grow with them.
📣 Pigeon on politics - While we’re still at least a year from any election (probably), healthcare could dictate who gets the crown and who goes home empty-handed, so this week we’re taking an impartial look to see where both parties stand: In the red corner, Labour would modernise health service, overhaul NHS App says Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. In the blue, Lord Markham, who says Govt is committed to fund digital health, ease market access
Meanwhile, in Accelerator-Land…
📈 Google for Startups has opened applications for its Growth Academy: AI for Health - A three-month program providing healthcare and wellbeing startups with essential growth skills, internationalisation strategies, and Google tools & products to help them scale.
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 Healthtech Pigeon - Health, Out now on DVD - Join James, Jessica, Huw and THC Primary Care’s Tara Humphrey as they take a deep-dive into the week’s healthtech stories.
🔊 The Healthtech Podcast #307 The neurome revolution with BIOS Health CEO Emil Hewage - Emil reveals how their neural interfaces and AI technology read and rewrite the neural "code" to correct faulty signals in real-time, paving the way for targeted digital therapies.
Events 📅
🔬Discovery Park Innovation Summit - Discovery Park
🕑 June 22, 9.30am-4.30pm
📍 Discovery Park, Sandwich
🖥️ Can digital education help stroke survivors to have better outcomes? A perspective from UCLH - Cognitant
🕑 June 22, 8.15-9.00am
📍 Online
🗺️ Navigating changes to the GP Contract - Klinik Healthcare Solutions
🕑 June 22, 12-1pm
📍 Online
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🎥 Youtube Health Features Expansion - Medical content creator? Getting a lot of traffic on your youtube? Apply now to expand the available features for you channel and content.
👩⚕️Director of Client Success, Maven Clinic - A remote role in one of the most important women’s health companies going today. Get involved today!
📊Digital Health Project Manager, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust - Take a leading role in the delivery and identification of digital health solutions for the Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).
🧐 Product Manager, Huma (iPLATO) - Join the company with confounding levels of FDA success as a product manager at iPLATO, acquired by Huma in January last year.
*Reader, for context, the kind folks at Huma sent us some actual mangoes to say thank you for inviting them to a recent event. Seriously, they were great. They had no sway on the editorial integrity of this fine publication.
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
At SomX, we are clinicians, scientists, creatives and communicators dedicated to elevating healthtech and biotech. For our clients, we provide communications strategy, multimedia content marketing, public relations, events and branding/design services. Get in touch to find out how we can support your healthtech company.