#204 - Who will look after Pigeon when we're old? ☎️
The one-minute healthtech roundup
Hi friends,
This week: Can healthtech help us age better? Can an AI a day keep anxiety at bay? and what does the future of urgent care look like?
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀
Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Jessica and James from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter (with some help from Ieso’s Dr Clare Palmer). Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
🧓 Health tech can help reframe ageing as an opportunity, not a problem – Pigeon’s long since accepted we’re never going to be able to afford to retire at a sensible age, so hopefully we’ll make enough money to afford robots to keep us moving and healthy in our twilight years. This article takes readers on a trip to Pigeon’s favourite place, The National Robotarium, to find out more.
🦄 GenAI investment to delay profitability at digital health unicorn Kry – All the good numbers are trending up, and all the bad ones are headed downward at tele-turned-physical-healthcare scaleup Kry, which is teasing a new generative AI product that could cut admin for their staff. There’s more AI to come, but they’re being coy on the details, for now.
😰 Study proves AI programme has effectiveness to human-delivered care – This study hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, and Pigeon, for one, is excited to see feathers fly as different voices share their 2¢. On the face of it though, Ieso have themselves some impressive outcomes both in terms of the cohort’s reduction in anxiety, and the minimal input required from humans — results the study’s lead, Dr Clare Palmer, kindly joined this week’s podcast to discuss in more detail.
Above: Change in anxiety symptoms from baseline to final score for all groups.
🩺 How Ada Health Is Advancing Women’s Health Diagnostics in the Digital Age – Already something of a healthtech success story, AI-driven healthcare platform Ada Health knows that 68% of its user-base is women, and those users rely on it heavily for diagnosis and support for gender-specific issues. In an in-depth article Ada’s Co-founder and chief medical officer talks about how the company is cementing its women’s health play, and driving better outcomes as a result.
📲 Care Where You Need It, When you Need It – The opening line may feel a tad too California-specific (the frequency with which Pigeon is bitten by a wild animal in suburban south-east London is, at most, occasional), but the technology is something we can all get behind – enter the concept (and company) of ‘Smart Urgent Care’, that can use your wearables and an app to minimise ER visits.
🦀 GPs use AI to boost cancer detection rates in England by 8% – Doctors tend to be pretty good at spotting symptoms and signs that are worth investigating, but they’re not going to catch everything. ‘C the Signs’ was developed to close that gap, and initial studies show a boost in detection rates.
🤖 Are AI-chatbots suitable for hospitals? Diagnostic capabilities of large language models tested – A worthy test: if LLMs can pass medical exams, can they be trusted to diagnose people attending hospital? Based on these results: Absolutely flapping not*.
🚎 Why an ‘AI health coach’ won’t solve the world’s chronic disease problems – As Pigeon indulges in a dramatic shift from “healthtech s**tposters” to “philosophers on the the existential impact on AI”, we spend our time coo-ing over articles like this one, in which a relatively well known tech researcher questions whether the Altman-Huffington health play is quite the right way to go.
📸 Diagnosing STIs with a ‘selfie’? AI could make it possible – These aren’t the sort of selfies you’ll be sharing on the family group chat. An intrepid team of sexual health researchers and epidemiologists are working on an AI that could diagnose STIs by analysing a picture of….abnormalities. Pro: integrate it into Tinder, and diagnosis rates would skyrocket. Con: Aren’t we trying to discourage this sort of behaviour?
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
World Congress on Healthcare and Technologies
🕣 Aug 8-9
📍 London
Intelligent Health: Basel
🕣 Sept 11-12
📍 Basel, Switzerland
Healthtech Innovation Day
🕣 Sept 17-18
📍 Paris, France
Hardian Health Tech Summit -(tickets available to newsletter subscribers only)
🕣 Sept 19
📍 London
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 🕵️♀️
🧑🔬 Founder in Residence, Next Generation Therapeutics for Parkinson's, Deep Science Ventures – Deep Science Ventures are taking a fresh approach to venture building in deep tech and life sciences. If you’ve got a deep understanding of biotech and therapeutic development, an entrepreneurial mindset, and you’re looking for a mission, look no further.
💰 Senior Health Economist, Adora Digital Health– Passionate about women’s health, know your way around data and statistics, and know how to build a bulletproof economic case? This must be the place for you.
👩🌾 Digital Health Solutions Manager, Astellas Pharma – An exciting opportunity for any pharma-data expert to bring their way with numbers and a knack for technology to the clinical research space.
📢 Patient Care Advisor, ZAVA – ZAVA thinks healthcare is too expensive (they’re not wrong), so they’re trying to fix it. That’s what they do. What you do would be providing a top notch service and delivering quality patient care.
🗣️ Digital Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Doctor Care Anywhere – Much like Doctor Care Anywhere as a name tells people straight away what they offer, so this job title tells ACPs what they’re getting if they apply. Know anyone who might be a good fit?
✏️ Innovation Lead - Health Technologies, Innovate UK – If you know and love healthtech as much as Pigeon does, then sorry, we’re not hiring right now, have you thought about this role at Innovate UK instead? It seems to require similar interests and skills.
**Seriously, a 13% success rate in diagnosis of patients with an inflamed gallbladder? You literally poke the patient slightly under the right rib, and if they scream in pain , it’s an inflamed gallbladder. If Pigeon can do it, LLMs should be able to.
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
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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.