#207 - Somewhere on the Tongue Colour Spectrum
#207 - Somewhere on the Tongue Colour Spectrum
The one-minute healthtech roundup.
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Hi friends,
This week: What your tongue says about you, 23andMe changes direction, and more employees seek out care through their benefits package
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Belle and James from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
👅 Innovative AI system uses tongue color to identify multiple health conditions – If you’ve ever asked yourself the question: “Is that person having an acute stroke or have they just finished a raspberry slushie?”, then this one’s for you: researchers have trained an AI to analyse your tongue and determine what affliction currently ails you, purely based on its colour. Honestly, nothing surprises us anymore.
🧬 23andMe to launch GLP-1 telehealth offering, trims internal drug development team – The personal genomics giant is going through what some might call a ‘difficult phase’. To a casual observer, the company might be perceived as lumbering from backward step to u-turn, hitting the headlines on a monthly basis as it struggles to decide what it wants to do, and what corporate structure it needs to do it. To an expert, however, there’s no ‘might’ about it…
📲 Surge in use of digital healthcare apps: Unum – While the headline makes a broad claim the article can’t quite back up, Unum’s data does hold some potentially damning insights into the numbers of employees turning to GP and mental health services offered by their employers as waiting lists for public services remain long.
🏡 Vivid Health brings generative AI into home healthcare, hospital-at-home services – Why should Doctors be the only to benefit from Gen-AI-assisted documentation? Vivid are out to make sure that home healthcare workers documentation burden is minimised through their new tools. As Pigeons, we empathise, we’d do it with this newsletter if we could.
🌍 Navigating the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act for Healthcare – The EU AI Act is now in force, which for healthcare companies using AI may present some interesting challenges. Are most questions about AI’s use as a medical device covered in other legislation/regulations? Yes. Does the act give AI developers quite a lot of other things to think about? Also yes. Here’s a handy guide on what you need to consider – but be warned: it’s not what we’d call light reading.
🛒 Welldoc Partners with Instacart to Enhance Cardiometabolic Health – It’s all well and good to tell people they need to eat better to improve their health, but let’s face it: most people don’t really know how. Pigeon can’t help but be impressed by a partnership that ditches tech jargon in favour of connecting your health app to a grocery provider. Hopefully it works as well in practice as it sounds on paper.
🕶️ Top 10: Uses of the Metaverse in Healthcare – The metaverse has legs (in healthcare at least). We’ve heard so many great examples of how virtual reality is transforming healthcare lately, but it’s rare an article captured the sheer breadth of its applications. Don your headset and let’s go!
📈 Hims & Hers CEO: Women's health business "will likely" eclipse men's – In the latest evidence that women’s health continues to be a sound investment (who’d have thought that providing high quality advice and care for issues specific to half the population might be a good idea?) the US men’s health brand Hims & Hers, which started as just ‘Hims’, may be much more ‘hers’ in the future.
🦷 Berlin healthtech startup Roger secures €7M –Only a profession as unassuming as dentistry would seek to develop a potentially transformative all-in-one practice management solution and give it a name best known for its use by a quiet Swiss man with a tennis racket. Pigeon hopes this German startup has as much success in their chosen field as Mr Federer has had in his.
🙅 Lombard Odier shuts down health tech fund – Disappointing news from Lombard Odier Investment Managers, which has shuttered its healthtech fund after the market was deemed to be underperforming and ‘unsustainable’. It’s already been removed from their website, so Pigeon can’t tell you which companies were affected. Oh well, you know the saying: As one fund closes, another one opens.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
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
Health on Stage
🕣 Sept 19
📍Brussels, Belgium
Mental Health Innovation Network
🕣 Sept 20
📍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 🕵️♀️
🧱 Co-Founder, Umbi Health – Maternal health startup Umbi is setting out to close a gap in women’s health outcomes, and its starting in one of the most critical areas – pregnancy. If you’re passionate about improving women’s health, have experience at C-suite level, and want to get in on the ground floor of a new venture, this is the place for you.
🍄🟫 Senior Medical Strategist, EVERSANA – Got a background in life sciences, keen commercial nous, and a knack for launching new life sciences products? Check out this role at life sciences commercialisation specialists Eversana
📀 Head of Health data strategy, Bupa – Data huh? Loads of it around but not everyone’s clear on what to do with it. That’s where you come in. Help private healthcare/insurance giant Bupa drive forward their clinical data strategy and turn their data into better member and business outcomes.
👷 Venture Manager, LIHE – KCL’s new London Institute for Healthcare Engineering is here with yet another great job for someone with a bit of expertise working with healthcare companies and accelerating their route to scale and success. If you fit the bill, you know what to do.
📐 Healthtech Regulatory Lead, Centre for Process Innovation – Bit of a regulatory expert? Know your stuff and think you could help others navigate a tangled web of regulatory….stuff? The CPI needs 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.