#190 - Happiness is a state of mind
#190 - Happiness is a state of mind
The one-minute healthtech roundup
Hi friends,
This week: Can we measure mental health? A big boost for clinical trial data analysis, and aussie consumers raise the alarm about telehealth.
News Bites 🥪
📺 ‘What we’re seeing is not telehealth’: alarm over doctors using AI and prescribing without seeing patients – Does a clinician need to see a patient before they recommend treatment or prescribe medication? That’s the question Australian regulators may be finding themselves forced to answer, as consumer groups raise concerns.
✂️ Healthtech Zoe announces 20% cost cutting, detailing redundancy packages – Despite taking on more than 100,000 new members in the last year, the UK’s ‘fastest growing healthtech’ is having to cut back. While talk of burn-rates and customer churn raise some interesting questions about user-retention and adherence for subscription services generally, ultimately, Pigeon’s thoughts are with those affected.
🥸 Can synthetic data boost fairness in medical imaging AI? – Over in the world of radiological AI, it’s all gone a little bit meta: without a wide enough range of real images on which to train AI, researchers are using diffusion to generate more images…to…train…the AI. Pigeon’s off for a lie down.
🔑 London-based HealthKey secures €1.32 million to improve how employees access and pay for healthcare – Let’s face it, employee health benefits can be a bit hit-and-miss. Don’t get Pigeon wrong, we’re all grateful for the health insurance, but in most-cases, it’s a bit ‘here’s your cashplan, take it or leave it!’ [Could you raise this with HR rather than putting it in an email to 5000+ people? thanks – Ed.] Healthkey is out to build employee assistance programmes that broaden the choice of services available to employees.
⌚︎ A Wearable Tech Gives Pharmas & Therapists Better Feel for Changes in Mental Health – Among the biggest challenges in mental healthcare: it’s hard to get accurate clinical readings for, and people are actually quite bad at describing their mental state (most of them don’t have a newsletter to vent in either, so that doesn’t help either). Feel Therapeutics (who take the Pigeon award for ‘Most on-the-nose company name’) have developed a wearable they say changes this.
🧠 LunaJoy Health Adds $4.2M in Funding; Launches ‘LunaCare’ for Women’s Mental Health – Virtual counselling and therapy provider LunaJoy Health has set its sights on maternal mental health, and has picked up a healthy fundraise as they launch a new integrated approach, backed by the lofty heights of Ycombinator.
🛞 How To Build A Flywheel Of Scientific Validation For Digital Health Startups – Repeat after Pigeon: EVIDENCE. IS. EVERYTHING. In this article Posit Science CEO Henry Mahncke gives tips to innovators with the premise: ‘How to make friends and develop scientific validation’. After you’ve nailed the first part, it’s basically smooth sailing.
💊 Qureight raises $8.5m to use AI to speed up the $92bn clinical trials market – The pace at which new therapies are approved could be about to get a significant boost, as Cambridge techbio mob Qureight picks up a major cash injection for its tech, which pulls clinical trial data from different platforms and analyses it using AI.
🧑⚕️ MyOpNotes Secures Innovate UK Funding to Revolutionise Surgical Documentation in Leeds – What procedure did your surgeon perform? What else did they do? They know. Hopefully you do, too. Now your hospital and the CFO know too, and can get properly reimbursed, as MyopNotes picks up funding to expand its service.
🤺 Founder leads boardroom coup at BenevolentAI – it’s been a rocky 18 months for AI drug discovery pioneers Benevolent AI, with major lows and some more recent positive partnerships with Pharma giant Merck. That said, its stock price remains at just a fraction of its £1bn, and its founder and largest shareholder have decided enough is enough.
What to listen to 🔊
🐦 The Healthtech Pigeon Podcast — Join Aahuti and Huw as they take a deep dive into the week’s healthtech news and views.
🔊 The Healthtech Podcast #346 How technology can connect communities: a vision for ageing and care with Max Parmentier, CEO of Birdie — James is joined by Max Parmentier, CEO and co-founder of Birdie, the intelligent platform for home care. Founded in 2017, Birdie now equips over 1,000 homecare providers with digital tools for managing, delivering and championing outstanding care.
🔊 Evolution Exchange #148 Clinically-led, Digitally-driven - the role of a digital midwife — Host Matthew Plant speaks to a who’s who of digital midwives about the role of digital midwifery and clinical informatics in shaping the future of healthcare delivery.
Events 📅
HPN North
🕣 April 23-24
📍 Manchester
Digital Healthcare Show
🕣 April 24-25
📍 ExCel London
LSX World Congress
🕣 April 29-30
📍 Business Design Centre, London
Digital Health Festival
🕣 May 7-8
📍 Melbourne
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup to see all of the best upcoming healthtech, biotech and healthcare events
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🔍 Lead User Researcher for Digital Urgent and Emergency Care, NHS England – User centred design is at the heart of building services that make a real difference to their users. If you’ve got the required user-research experience and a passion for health and social care and product development, this is the role for you.
👨💻 Programme Head - Health and Social Care, TechUK – want to work with NHS and healthcare organisations to lay the foundations for a tech-enabled healthcare system? Be a representative of techUK’s healthcare members in front of essential audiences.
🤝 Consultative Business Development Manager - UK Health Systems, ORCHA – ORCHA is hiring, and they’re looking for someone with BD nous and a shared passion for quality and accessibility in healthtech. If that’s you, then hit apply now.
📽️ Project Manager, Altera Digital Health – EPR (and other things) builder Altera is looking for a project manager to push forward projects and drive forward their mission in the healthcare space.
🕵️ Hereford & Worcs ICB scouting for solutions to improve Continuing Healthcare service — West Midlands Health and Wellbeing Innovation Network are running a challenge led innovation programme to improve staff and patient experiences of the NHS CHC – If you’re working on remote monitoring, conversational AI, intelligent document management or similar services, there’s a wealth of support, opportunities and funding up for grabs.
✅ Associate - Quality Asssurance & Regulator Affairs, Hardian Health — Fancy yourself a dab hand in regulatory issues surrounding AI and medical devices? Want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in supporting clients while getting the support and training you need to grow in the role? There’s no better place to do that than Hardian Health.
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.