#174 - Health...on a Moped? 🏍️
#174 - Health...on a Moped? 🏍️
The one-minute healthtech roundup
Hi friends,
This week: From Grocerytech to healthtech, finding children at risk of mental health issues, and meeting your digital twin.
News Bites 🥪
🦍 Gorillas founder Kağan Sümer raises pre-seed round for secret healthtech startup – Based on Grocery startup Gorillas’ checkered history, there’s a lot of jokes we could make here, but we won’t. Instead, we’ll just welcome the possibility of a new app that will help us manage our health better….let’s just hope that when the UK rollout comes, they’ll deliver outside of Shoreditch and Mayfair.
🤳 French medtech startup i-Virtual secures €3M for measuring vital signs through video selfies – Wearables are over. All vital signs that matter can now be captured while you make that new TikTok video, thanks to the team at i-Virtual. Two benefits: easier capture of key biomarkers, and fewer excuses to not make that sassy video you’ve had in your head for the last 3 weeks. Get on it.
🤖 Report: AI, value-based care are growing sectors in digital health but lack large-scale adoption – AI in healthcare…everybody’s talking about it, nobody’s doing it. Well, not exactly, but they are struggling to scale it – just one of the top trends in Rock Health’s turn of 2024 report.
❌ DMA results show only 10-30% of trusts with an EPR have key functionality – Remember when Pigeon waxed lyrical about NHS trusts hitting their 90% EPR target? No? Do you really love Pigeon if you didn’t remember that niche story from 6 weeks ago where we heaped praise on the NHS for hitting a target early? Well, we take some of that praise back this week – yes, they’ve got EPRs, but they’re not using them right.
📖 AI In Healthcare: Are People Losing Or Gaining Control? – Pigeon prefers not to think about the use of AI in healthcare in such binary terms as ‘losing’ or ‘gaining’ control. Rather, we like to think about it as yet another end-user license agreement we’re never going to read, so how will we know what control we have until it’s too late?
🚸 Can AI find the children at risk of mental health conditions? – There’s no surprise in finding out our health data can be used to identify if you’re at risk of developing a mental health condition. But what about your non-health data? A project to identify children who could be at risk and support them with early intervention is underway, using health, education and social services data.
🩸 Carthera brings Series B round to £35m with additional £3.8m funding – Heard of the blood brain barrier? You have now. Disrupting it enables the use of drug therapies for conditions including alzheimers and cancer at higher concentrations for a short window, enhancing efficacy. That’s what Carthera are doing with their Sonocloud device – something that’s scored them a £35m series B.
👯 Digital twin company Twin Health secures $50M – Pigeon was sad to learn that the value of digital twins in healthcare terms was not as a Dorian Gray-esque alternate version of us that gets old and decrepit while we eat donuts and stay perfectly thin. That said, Twin Health believes they could help improve nutrition, activity and reverse metabolic diseases, so that’s basically the same thing, right?
🚨 Can Neu Health Transform Parkinson's Care? – Oxford spinout Neu Health is closing a gap in the treatment of Parkinsons’ – using patients’ smartphones to capture data on a dashboard that can help clinicians make the best use of their interactions with patients and make informed decisions on care. Rory Cellan Jones speaks to the team behind it.
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 Healthtech Pigeon has flown south for Winter (well, actually we’re just wing-deep in eggnog and stuffing ourselves with mince pies), so the podcast will return in early 2024 — We’d like to thank all of our guests and listeners for an amazing year, and wish everyone a happy holidays! See you in January!
🔊The Healthtech Podcast - The truth behind Dr Karan Rajan: How his influence is changing public health - James is joined by Dr Karan Rajan, NHS surgeon and clinical lecturer at The University of Sunderland Medical School. However, he is also a social media educator, with over 5.2 million followers on TikTok, dispelling popular medical myths and working to make health, science and medicine engaging, entertaining, and accessible to a wide audience.
Events 📅
HETT North
🕣 28 February
📍 Manchester
HealthTechX Summit 2024
🕣 28 February - Use HTX24SMITH for 30% off your ticket
📍 The Hurlingham Club, London
London Biotechnology Show
🕣 8-9 May 2024
📍 Olympia West, London
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🟢 Co-founder / CTO - healthtech, Scrupulous AI - Admit it, you’d rather work for scrupulous AI over unscrupulous AI? over course you would. The (currently one-person) startup is looking for someone to help them build the personal assistant for doctors. A worthy effort for anyone looking to take a leap and be employee number 2.
💰 Sales Director - Health Tech (London), Abtrace - Selling algorithms into primary care? If you’re up to the challenge this may be the role for you.
🧑💻 Senior Product Designer, Patchwork Health - The ever impressive Patchwork Health team are looking for a senior product designer. Apply now!
📀 Digital Project Lead, GSK - Want to lead on the development of digital health technologies for a pharmaceutical giant? Head on over to see if you fit the bill.
👉 Medical Advisor - Marketing - Our friends at Flo (should that be Flo Friends?) are looking for a clinically-experienced expert in medical content to help ensure their content hits the quality and accuracy marks every time. Sound like you?
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 for 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.