#209 - The algorithm behind the curtain
#209 - The algorithm behind the curtain
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by SciQ: Healthtech recruitment, by ex-industry professionals.
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Hi friends,
This week: Healthcare AI continues to be both very exciting and quite disappointing, people are far more likely to pay attention to health prompts when they don’t feel well, and why your local library has a new favourite app.
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Jessica and James from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
⁉️ Survey: AI most exciting emerging technology in healthcare – In what is surely the least informative survey since someone first said ‘hey, this generative AI thing could be useful in healthcare’, we find that ultimately, no one’s really on the same page about what we’re talking about, or what we’re using it for.
🗣️ How to make sure AI helps rather than hinders healthcare – For an industry where so much remains unexplained or unproven, humility is a rare trait. The subject of this interview, Ulster University’s Prof Raymond Bond has it in abundance, which is odd for a man with so many fascinating-sounding projects exploring AI’s role in our health, all going on at the same time – and which sound like they’re worth your attention.
🏛️ The problem of gender imbalance in EU digital healthcare – Women’s under-representation in healthcare generally are now well understood, as are the variations in outcomes this under-representation creates. In the past 20 years, representation has improved, but is the shift toward digital delivery and the problem of women’s access to STEM careers actually pushing healthcare backwards? Possibly.
🫁 Decentralised trial reveals home-testing behaviours for respiratory infections – The TL;DR here, is that patients engaged enough to tell an app or professional what they’re experiencing are more likely to take a test when asked, compared to those whose wearable data prompted the test. It’s perhaps unsurprising that how you feel might influence action more than how you actually are, but hey, stupid biomarkers, what do they know?
🫂 Pfizer Launches Direct-to-Consumer Service — The world’s biggest pharma companies have decided to cut out the middle man, with Pfizer bringing a telehealth and prescription filling service straight to their patients. The democratic-sounding ‘PfizerForAll’ programme puts patients in control of their Covid-19, migraine and influenza treatment, with options to schedule vaccines too. But they’re not the only ones pharm-ing the D2C model, after Eli Lilly got in the game earlier in the year.
🐌 The NHS’s digital problem: how old infrastructure is slowing down healthcare services – The shared enemy of the frontline clinician and the healthtech innovator, legacy tech is far from a new problem – even if there are disagreements on what to do about it. For the uninitiated (or the initiated who want a refresher), here’s a rare high-quality summary of the challenge we face, and why ‘getting the basics right’ feels more critical than ever.
🪑 A trust based framework for the envelopment of medical AI – Trust is a big deal in AI, but possibly not an insurmountable problem. More and more people suggest they’re at least comfortable with the use of the technology in their care, with some caveats. Could this proposal of a trust-based framework help bridge the gap between what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not?
👯 How Generative AI Could Reinvent Mental Healthcare: Therapeutic Twins – What if we had someone who told us what we should do that would make us feel better when we were feeling depressed or anxious? What if we could predict when we were most likely to feel that way? What if that system was your digital twin? Honestly, it sounds awful to this Pigeon (who just wants a little empathy right now, and isn’t yet feeling solutions-oriented), but we suppose it’s worth a try.
📚 Libraries in England to promote the NHS App – “Hey there, small child and/or person aged 65 or over, put down that copy of George’s Marvellous Medicine and/or Great Expectations, and let me show you this app…!”. Pigeon is of course being facetious; so much of inclusive patient and citizen engagement is about meeting the user where they actually are, and initiatives like this are the embodiment of that. Now if we can only stop closing the libraries…
🕶️ Over Half Of Major US Senior Care Providers Now Use VR – Look at that – while Pigeon waxes lyrical about VR one day going mainstream in healthcare, elderly care quietly made it happen in the US. How it’s being used may vary (although Rendever’s numbers suggest fitness is high on the list), but assistive-living settings take the top spot in the ‘where’ tables.
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 🕵️♀️
🏥 Deputy Directors, Medtech/Digital, NHS England – There are few better places to push innovation in healthcare than at the heart of the system, and these two roles working on medtech and digital respectively are about as close to the action as its possible to be. Relevant experience? Passion for innovation? Willing to work with industry? Attend Emily’s webinar to find out more. Then apply, obvious….
🔴 Clinical Assessor – Conformity Assessments, Scarlet – Europes’ only notified body specialising in software and AI needs someone with a background in building, deploying or evaluating software medical devices to come and bring that awareness to other technologies and devices. If that sounds like you, get on it!
🛋️ Account Manager – Digital Therapy, Koa Health – Passionate about making mental well-being accessible and effective for everyone? You’ve just found your tribe. It helps you’ve got some useful, compliant therapies to implement, you just need to help your clients make the most of them.
🥳 Chief of Staff, Joy – Joy are looking for somebody big. We’re talking 10+ years, high-performance, high-tech, big budgets big. And in return? An exciting role in the senior leadership team of a company moving fast in the preventative health space, with traction in the places that matter.
🦸 RevOps Manager, KareHero – You’re an inquisitive, RevOps expert with an eye on the bigger picture and experience in hubspot. They’re a self-described health-tech care concierge solution for family caregivers. Could it be any more obvious?
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
This week’s edition of Healthtech Pigeon is powered by our friends at SciQ, the HealthTech Recruitment Specialists. SciQ connect the best candidates with organisations that make the biggest impact to the health of current and future generations. Find the talent your business needs to scale.
Healthtech Pigeon is curated and produced by SomX, the 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.