#214 - Sympathy for Lady Swan 🦢
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by SciQ: Healthtech recruitment, by ex-industry professionals.
Hi friends,
This week: Huma’s acquisition spree continues, diagnostics gets weirder and weirder, and there’s a new pelvic health platform in town.
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.
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.
News Bites 🥪
💰 Huma acquires eConsult to become 'end-to-end tech platform' – Huma’s ‘gotta catch-em-all’ approach to healthcare technology suppliers continues as it picks up on of primary care’s most used-solutions. At this point it’s hard not to believe Huma will one day simply acquire ‘all of healthcare’, but until then, this will have to do.
✏️ Are LLM-based ambient scribes and clinical summarisers medical devices? – Since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022, it seems nowhere have LLMs been more applied to healthcare than as ambient clinical scribes. And for as long as they have existed, so have arguments about their regulatory status. Presented without comment, this article is a very interesting read. Grab a coffee, block at least an hour in your calendar and settle in.
😮💨 Owlstone Medical lands five-year deal with FDA – When the regulator asks for your help, you know you’re doing something right. Such is the case for Owlstone Medical, who will work with the US FDA to examine how we identify key chemicals in peoples’ breath, to assist with non-invasive diagnostics. Honestly, once we can diagnose with breath, speech, eyes, tongue colour and gait, diagnostics is going to be a weird field.
🚀 Science fiction health technology a step closer – ….but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it. Who didn’t grow up watching Star Trek and secretly want a tricorder? [People who left the house. Burn. – Ed.] Well we’re not really there, but photoacoustic imaging technology surely brings us a little closer…
💵 Qure.ai pursuing large AI with $65M Series D funding and more briefs – Pigeon just can’t get away from diagnostics talk this week, as even the week’s top raises are dominated by companies seeking to better understand what plagues us in more detail. Top of the list is Qure.AI’s Series D funding round, with South Korean ‘retinal-diagnostic-for-cardiovascular disease’ tech solution MediWhale* not far behind.
🤖 AI Is the Only Unchecked US 'Sector of Consequence,' Says Health Care Exec – While many factions are exploring how AI in healthcare could be regulated, there’s no sign of anything super concrete on the horizon. That, says the Co-founder of Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), makes AI the only industry that doesn’t have the appropriate systems in place to ensure US consumers (and patients) are protected. Thankfully, all the regulators that do exist are doing a really great job.
🐦 How your AI-enabled future self could boost mental wellbeing – There was a time when talking to yourself wasn’t really the done thing. That was before we could have text conversations with our future selves…which, given this newsletter shows up in our inboxes every week too, is basically what Pigeon is already doing. Does it help our mental wellbeing? No. It just prompts a minor heart attack when we spot the typos.
♀ Hyivy Health Secures $2M for Pelvic Rehab Platform – Hyivy Health is aiming to bring a pelvic rehabilitation platform to patients, helping measure pain and support pain treatment, as well as assist diagnosis of the conditions that cause that pain. As the company aims to get the technology through FDA approval with the help of a $2m raise, its CEO has highlighted the difficulties of raising in the women’s health space.
🦢 How Epic's 81-Year-Old Billionaire Founder Plans To Keep Her Health Data Empire Private Forever – You might not know Judy Faulkner, but you know the company she runs….either because you’ve used their software, or simply because, at $4.9B in revenue, they’re pretty hard to miss in the healthcare space. In a fairly staggering profile, we learn why about the company’s ten commandments, why Jules Verne and Harry Potter dominate the office decor, and why she calls herself Lady Swan (a nickname Pigeon can’t help but get behind).
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
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 🕵️♀️
♟️ Strategy and Operations Lead, Healthera – Consider yourself a bit of an expert in taking digital health products to market? Well if you can back it up with evidence and experience, Healthera may be the place for you.
🩺 Business Development Manager, Digital Health – One of the top digital health trade news, events and intelligence platforms is looking for a B2B sales expert to hawk their valuable wares to prospective customers across the health sector. If you’re that expert, hit apply.
🧷 Clinical Safety Specialist, Magentus – Global healthcare technology experts Magentus are looking for someone with a track record in clinical safety and an understanding of the NHS to help ensure their platforms are as safe as can be for patients.
💻 Sr. Product Manager, Digital Healthcare, Clario — If you’re wise in the ways of product management and you can claim deep expertise in the clinical trial industry, this role at Clario could be for you.
📈 Senior Director Business Development, Analytics (EMEA), HIMSS – It’s all about sales in the jobs section this week, as one of healthcare’s premiere informatics organisations looks for a new face to grow and nurture their relationships with customers for their analytics function.
*Fun fact: ‘Mediwhale’ was on the list of rejected names for this newsletter. The mascot potential alone means it was a missed opportunity.
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.