#167 - Drugs, falling from the sky ☔️
The one-minute healthtech roundup
Hi friends,
This week: Healthtech’s big brain-drain, heart failure to be treated at home, and WHO* thinks they know how to regulate AI?
News Bites 🥪
💊 Amazon will start testing drones that will drop prescriptions on your doorstep, literally - Drugs falling from the skies, delivered by winged messengers? When people talk about technology taking your job, this is what they mean. Pigeon is still glad we gave up delivering notes and retrained in newsletter writing.
🛳️ HealthTech companies moving overseas due to manufacturing and scale-up barriers – UK healthtech is experiencing an innovation brain drain, as companies struggle to build anything here (it’s too expensive) and when they do, regulators are pretty tough to work with. So like Pigeon’s bird world brethren, they’re migrating to sunnier climes. Unlike the birds, they might not be coming back….
🧱 King's secures £1.5m to develop the UK's first MedTech company builder – King’s College London is having a shot at building its own version of a venture studio, bringing in academic founders and supporting them through grant funding to turn their medtech concepts into fully-fledged, commercialised tools – supported by experts in everything a founder needs to know (like all of those QA and regulatory things we talked about earlier).
🧮 Are you typical, early or efficient? Could how (and when) you engage with your mental health app affect what you get out of it? – Get your data analysis hats on, because this one’s a goodun. A study assessed users’ engagement with the excellent Woebot mental health app to understand how different levels of engagement impacted resilience, mental health and real-world application of what they had learned.
💭 WHO outlines considerations for regulation of artificial intelligence for health – For the second week in a row, AI regulation is in the spotlight – and this time, we’re bringing out the big guns. Those big-picture types at the WHO have thrown down their top tips for regulators looking at the use of AI in healthcare and they are….basically things that apply to regulating any technology. Pigeon’s hoping the juicier stuff is coming next week.
💸 Berlin-based Lillian Care raises €2.4 million pre-seed to establish hybrid primary care in underserved regions – If you feel like it’s harder and harder to see a GP these days, you’re not the only one…In a quest to address this challenge in places where doctors are few and far between, Lillian Care makes it easier for nurses to answer patients’ healthcare questions instead.
❤️🩹 Heart failure to be treated at home as NHS expands virtual wards programme – When crises happen so regularly, you name them after a season, it’s time to do something about them. This year, the panacea for the Winter Crisis is virtual wards – and things are moving fast as heart failure becomes the latest condition to be added to the list of things you can treat people for at home.
🛑 Some virtual wards created with no budget for pharmacy staffing, says CQC – Oh ok, that sounds important. At least we spotted that before the crisis rolled around. Let’s all agree to get that sorted by Winter, yeah?
🚨 And finally, the contract for the Federated Data Platform has been awarded to… - Errr… well this is awkward. Everyone was so sure we’d have an announcement by now that we invited Joe from the Health Service Journal to talk about it on this week’s pod. Don’t worry, rather than reschedule, we thought we’d just get the lowdown on everything that’s happened so far.
We’re selecting 4 companies for FREE SomX support 💌
We talk a lot about values - a big part of that is collaborating with purpose-led people and organisations to make positive change. We work across the whole ecosystem with companies of all sizes and areas of focus, but there are some areas we’re really excited about right now.
So, from January we’re offering two free months of strategy and communications support for one company across each of the following categories:
🚺 Women’s health
🍄 Psychedelics
🤗 Mental health
🧬 Rare diseases
Whether your solution is in biotech, medtech, digital health or wellness, we want to hear from you! Interested? Register your interest here. [terms and conditions apply]
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 Healthtech Pigeon - The NHS Federated Data Platform, For Dummies… – Join Jessica, Huw and Health Service Journal's Joe Talora as they take an in-depth look at the NHS's Federated Data Platform (FDP), examining its origins, purposes, and the various controversies that have arisen in the lead up to the imminent contract award later this year.
🔊 The Healthtech Podcast #326 Profit vs. Passion: The Delicate Balance in Healthcare Investments with Mark E Watson III from Aquila Capital Partners - James is joined by Mark E Watson III, an entrepreneur, BioTech investor, advisor and philanthropist. His portfolio companies range from the fastest-growing physician-dispensed skincare brand to a platform predicting patient responses to oncology therapeutics as well as several InsureTech startups in the US.
Events 📅
Digitalhealth AI + Data
🕣 30-31 October
📍 Business Design Centre, Islington
Pharmacovigilance World 2023
🕣 1 November, 2023
📍 Wrights Lane, London
MedTech Innovation Assembly
🕣 2 November, 2023
📍 Nexus, University of Leeds
SEHTA International MedTech Expo
🕣 3 November, 2023
📍 Hilton London Tower Bridge, London
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
💻 Software Lead, Neurofenix - Take a leadership role in a digital therapeutics company supporting people with neurological problems through their rehabilitation.
🛌 Senior Product Manager, Patchwork Health - Patchwork are hiring for a list of jobs as long as you’re arm, so go check it out if this one isn’t for you. But if you’re a product manager looking for a role in one of healthtech’s most exciting scaleups, this one’s for you.
🌶️ Service Delivery Manager, Peppy - Peppy run a great line in services that enable employers to offer their employees valuable health services, covering everything from menopause, fertility, women’s health and men’s health. They’re looking for someone to own the delivery of those services.
🧠 Senior Partner, Translation Mental Health, The Wellcome Trust - Want to make an impact supporting the development and translation of new tools to tackle mental health challenges? This one’s for you.
*If you’re about to tell us we’ve used that joke before, then don’t. We know, and we’ll keep using it regardless of how un-funny it is.
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
SomX is a communications and creative agency elevating healthcare. We are clinicians, scientists, creatives and communicators dedicated to serving our healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector clients with services across strategy, content, PR, design, events and media production. Get in touch to learn more.