#213 - Take it up with our lawyers
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by Whereby - secure video calls for telehealth.
Hi friends,
This week: An epic lawsuit, Alan surprises us all, and we go big on material science.
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Huw and Belle from SomX breakdown the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Integrating video calling into your digital health solution can be a major pain, particularly when it comes to finding secure, developer-friendly platforms that treat users’ data as carefully as you do. Whereby specialises in integrated video calls for Telehealth. For over a decade, we’ve collaborated with healthcare professionals to enable seamless virtual consultations. We’re focused on optimising patient and practitioner experience while removing unnecessary heavy lifting from your engineering team with our flexible video call API.
News Bites 🥪
🎸 French healthtech unicorn Alan raises €173m Series F at €4bn valuation – ‘Alan? Who the **** is Alan?’* is a question few will be asking following a stonking €4bn valuation off its surprise series F. All of which goes to show: there’s serious money in health insurance tech – particularly if you can make it profitable, which Alan expects to do by 2026.
🧠 Brain activity patterns could help identify mental health markers – One of the biggest challenges in mental health care continues to be the difficulty of measurement beyond patient self-reporting. Could we identify patterns in brain activity that would allow us to identify clearly defined mental health biomarkers? Possibly, says a recent study.
📱 Digital mental health therapies could save thousands of NHS therapist hours – The wonks at UK’s health economics expert NICE have crunched the numbers, and have some positive things to say about digital mental health therapies. While the organisation is currently only recommending a few therapies across a range of conditions, it clearly believes the potential of these (and perhaps future) technologies is both high, and critical, given the current waiting list for talking therapies.
➡️ More than half of acute trusts signed up to the NHS FDP – The long slow sign-up to the Federated Data Platform continues. It’s not quite the 100% uptake NHS England is looking for (and has mandated, following a recent u-turn), but we’re sure that big consultancy contract to drive adoption will get everyone there in time.
📲 Astellas brings its first digital health product to US – Astellas, who you may know better for their work in pharma and their almost comical number of ABPI suspensions, has entered the digital health arena with a platform that combines a digital stethoscope, AI and Welldoc’s disease management app in a holy trinity for heart failure monitoring.
🧑⚖️ Startup Particle Health files antitrust lawsuit against Epic alleging it uses monopoly power to block competition – What is it with large EHR providers and accusations of anti-competitive behaviour? Not for the first time in the last 12 months, a large US EHR company is facing an antitrust lawsuit. Epic argues the claims, levied by health data insights platform Particle, are baseless, but the battle looks to be a bitter one – and one to follow. Pige’s view: If you take a shot at the EHR-King, you’d better not miss!
🦠 Graphene spike mat and magnet technology to fight antibiotic resistance – Does the technology contained within an ordinary fridge magnet have the potential to strike at the heart of antibiotic resistance? Err… sort of. Is it healthtech? Debatable, but there’s currently no bird-themed publication specifically for materials science, so we’re rolling with it.
🧑⚕️ That Message From Your Doctor? It May Have Been Drafted by A.I | Generative artificial intelligence in primary care: an online survey of UK general practitioners – On both sides of the Atlantic, clinicians are turning to generative AI tools to help with a number of clinical and administrative tasks, ranging from geenrating differential diagnoses, to writing patient letters. For the latter, Epic (making their second appearance this week) is actually providing a formal tool for users to help them write these letters in the US, whereas in the UK, medico-legal group the MDU is warning strongly against just that.
🏃♀️ Exakt Health raises €2M for the first digital sports physiotherapy certified as a medical device in Germany – Let’s end things with a sports health story, where Exakt Health has picked up a healthy dose of funding for its custom running plans which adapt to the user’s current health and fitness level to support physio outcomes. The exciting bit? It’s certified as a medical device, which just goes to show… how seriously Exakt takes running…?
How DrDoctor is using reliable, secure video calling to scale hybrid healthcare across the UK — Back in the long-gone era of 2019 (remember that? no pandemic or anything) the team at DrDoctor started exploring how to integrate video into their patient engagement platform to deliver truly hybrid healthcare.
By 2020, DrDoctor started working with telehealth video specialist Whereby, which helped the team roll-out video consultations for their customers. Through Whereby's secure, GDPR compliant and user-friendly video calls, DrDoctor has enabled three-quarters of it's 70 NHS Trust partners to incorporate video into their care approach. These consultations are also backed by patients, who give DrDoctor’s video 4.6 stars out of 5, on average.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
The Global Growth Engine of the Women's Health Industry
🕣 Oct 2
📍London
Sifted Summit | Healthtech Pigeon Official Summit Warm-up
🕣 Oct 2
📍London
What is the place of the clinical content creator
🕣 Oct 8
📍 Online
SIS Global Series
🕣 Oct 9
📍 London
Bupa Healthcare Symposium
🕣 Oct 15
📍 London
HLTH Las Vegas
🕣 Oct 20-23
📍 Las Vegas
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 🕵️♀️
❤️ Future Health Commission Pulse Survey (complete by 30 September) — If you're a clinician, manager or in a tech role anywhere in the world, the BMJ is trying to understand more about perceptions and use of digital technologies in healthcare delivery and has a survey they'd love for you to fill in. In return for ten minutes of your time, there’s a little treat for you at the end. (fine, we’ll spoil the surprise, it’s 20% off a ticket to the BMJ Future Health Event. If that’s not a good deal, we don’t know what is).
✅ Healthcare Compliance Manager, Consumer Health – You’re a healthcare compliance expert with a clear understanding of what you can and can’t say when it comes to pharmaceutical advertising. Norgine is a pharma company with a hell of a track record offering candidates what they call a 3D career. If you’re applying to find out what that means, we can’t blame you.
🗒️ Independent Prescriber, Numan – Another great UK men’s health company, Numan are looking for an Independent prescriber to join their team in Cardiff. You’ll have patient-facing experience, great IT literacy and want to be part of a team making a real difference to men’s health.
💊 Undergraduate Vacancies, Pfizer – Ready to start off your career in the pharmaceutical industry? There can be few better places to start than one of the world’s biggest companies, which is offering placements in three strands across Business & market, regulatory and R&D.
💉 Graduate Leadership Development Programme – The second big pharma opportunity in as many listings. Takeda is looking for talented graduates to join its leadership development programme.
🚒 Fullstack Software Engineer, Healthtech 1 – The Healthcare challengers at Healthtech-1 are on a hiring spree, and for their latest role are looking for a software whiz who can further their mission to automate the bits of primary care that most need it.
**A joke reserved solely for fans of 70s era British rock one-hit wonders.
Got news, jobs or events you think is worth coo-ing over? Let us know! Email us: news@healthtechpigeon.com
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.