Hi friends,
This week: elderly care comes out of the dark ages, AI stays in the Wild West, and politicians make promises about the future (of the NHS).
News Bites 🥪
👨👨👦👦 Brothers on mission to lift elderly care out of the dark ages – Meet Lottie, a marketplace for elderly care. Like Amazon, if Jeff Bezos was trying to sell you great care for your elderly relatives, rather than literally anything else. Pigeon’s not sure what elderly care looked like in the dark ages, but hopefully £16.5m is enough to lift it out of them.
🐢 Europe's emerging cancer tech startups – Cancer is still one of the leading causes of death across the planet, and while we’ve been rattling on about LLMs, the backlog keeps going up. So who are the companies transforming how we treat cancers and support cancer patients? We’re glad you asked….
🤠 New coalition launches to tame Wild West of AI – Initiatives focused on regulating Health AI are like buses….and if you can’t see where Pigeon’s going with this one, we’ll spell it out: On one bus, US health systems are teaming up with ensure standards…
On the next, a new agency with links to the WHO is positioning itself to be the global regulator of AI used in healthcare.
The FDA is driving the final bus, launching a new committee to explore how to regulate healthtech, with AI high on its agenda.
🦾 Pharmacierge to build 30ft medication-dispensing robot in London – Pigeon asks that UK Tech News put the image/blueprint of the giant medication dispensing robot higher up in the article. Without context, this is a terrifying headline. Hopefully this doesn’t spell an untimely end for the drug-dispensing robot penguins.
🤖 Google announces new generative AI search capabilities for doctors – We’ve already had LLMs capturing and structuring Doctors’ notes and conversations with patients and converting them into EHRs. Now Doctors are getting a tool to extract information faster, courtesy of Google.
🧑💻 AI language models could help diagnose schizophrenia – A potential breakthrough use of AI in diagnosis and neuroscience is on the cards after UCL scientists tested a theory about the predictability of responses to verbal fluency tasks.
🏃🏻♂️ Labour’s Fit for the Future fund to increase tech in the NHS – Labour’s Fit for the Future Fund is designed to ensure the NHS has high quality diagnostic technology and with it, the capacity to tackle the backlog, improve care outcomes and boost productivity. Pigeon also has a Fit for the Future Fund, which includes a few quid for a new pair of running shoes, and a warning not to order another pizza tomorrow.
Last call for health innovators… 🚨
Recruitment for the 2024 intake of the NHS Innovation Accelerator closes next Sunday, 22 October. If you’ve got a proven health and/or social care innovation you want to scale and you’ve not yet submitted your application, stop what you’re doing and apply now!
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 Healthtech Pigeon - A Time-travelling Healthtech Extravaganza – Join Jessica, James and Huw as they take a deep-dive into the week’s healthtech news and views.
🔊 The Healthtech Podcast #324 Connection, people and innovating insurance, with Lukasz Rzeczkowski from Trustedoctor – James is joined by Lukasz Rzeczkowski, founder of Trustedoctor a digital health platform infrastructure for medical providers, insurers and employers focused on virtual care in specialised medicine. Since exiting, he now focuses on the applications of AI in healthcare and bioscience.
Events 📅
MedTech World Summit
🕣 19-20 October
📍 Valletta, Malta
Use the code ‘FlyingtoMedTechMalta’ for 25% off your ticket.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🧪 Pharmacy Clinical Trial Administrator, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – Clinical trials are key to bringing new treatments to market, but failure rate is high. Ensuring they’re run right is essential, so if you want to be a part of that, apply to this role at UCL NHS Trust.
👷♀️ Lead Multiskilled Engineer, SureScreen Diagnostics – We love the mission, we love the sort-of punny name. If you’re an old school engineer with a love of hardware, machinery, and a passion for manufacturing diagnostic technologies, this one’s perfect for you.
🧑💻 Front-end Developer, Qureight – One of the most promising uses of AI in healthcare? Speeding up the identification of promising drug candidates. That’s what Qureight does, and as their new Front-end Developer, you’re helping to make that happen.
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.