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The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by Whereby - secure video calls for telehealth.
Hi friends,
This week: The British public share their views on how to fix the NHS, a survey reveals why patients miss hospital appointments, and the evidence builds for tCDS in treating depression.
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Jessica, Huw and Amy from SomX break down 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 🥪
💻 Government launches online platform to shape 10 year health plan – Here to demonstrate that the claim “There are no bad ideas” is rarely true, the British public now have a forum to share their views on how to improve the NHS. Suggestions such as ‘24/7 access to GP services’ (idealistic, but devastatingly impractical), sit side by side with ‘Stop outsourcing the NHS to Venture Capitalists’ (not sure this is how venture capital works), and “A Go-home man for A&E” (whatever this is, we want one).
🥼 Amazon Says AI Tools Reduce Healthcare Administrative Tasks 40% – Time is precious, and nowhere is this more true than for clinical care teams, for whom an entire industry appears to have sprung up claiming to streamline workflows and reduce time spent on admin. Amazon has become the latest to jump into the pool, with some strong claims about the benefits of its new suite of tools.
📈 AI-related maternal healthcare software improves odds of good care by 69%, research finds – Everyone needs a helping hand here and there, but should maternal healthcare teams be using clinical decision support systems to improve patient outcomes? Probably, says a comprehensive review of published studies.
🩻 NHS in England given go-ahead for AI scans to help detect bone fractures – AI continues to make waves in the radiology space, and now NICE has given the greenlight for the use of fracture-detecting bolt-ons to the radiology workflow that could prevent patients experiencing worse breaks further down the line.
📞 DrDoctor study reveals why patients miss hospital appointments – Pigeon knows the main reason patients miss their appointments is that they go to the wrong department, mishear the name when the doctor calls them, and end up sitting in an appointment meant for an 87 year old named Midge who needs a hip replacement. (What…just us?) Anyway…really the most startling finding from this is just how few people say they missed an appointment because they forgot about it.
🚽 Toilet camera uses AI to analyze pics of poop and measure your gut health – There are no taboos on the road to digitally-enabled health improvements. That said, Pigeon struggled with this one….presumably so did all the health press, as this comes to us from digital camera magazine. We can’t help but think (hope?) simpler alternatives to gut health monitoring exist.
🧠 Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation treatment for major depressive disorder: a fully remote phase 2 randomized sham-controlled trial – In the latest piece of good news for the companies that want to send electric pulses into our brains, an RCT of tDCS showed that a 10-week course for patients with major depressive disorder showed positive results around efficacy adherence and safety.
🚦 Digital treatment for insomnia awaiting NHS funding secures FDA clearance – To say that the route to market for digital therapeutics isn’t always straightforward slightly undersells how bloody awkward it really is to get these tools into patients’ hands. Two years after Sleepio secured approval from the UK’s NICE (an acronym that many DTx developers might say is something of a misnomer), the NHS won’t pay for it. In that time, the US market appears to have rapidly opened up.
📹 Shaping the Future of Mental Health Care Through Technology — Mental health is fast becoming a top priority for many healthcare organisations, as the stigma around these conditions slowly reduces, and the importance of care is dragged into the spotlight. This article — from video call specialists Whereby — explores the increasingly important role of technology and AI in supporting a stretched mental health workforce and helping telehealth platforms to provide effective virtual solutions for both patients and practitioners.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
Healthcare Conference 2024
🕣 Oct 31
📍 London
EHRCON24 - first annual openEHR International Conference
🕣 Nov 6
📍 Reading, UK
Med-Tech World, Malta
🕣 Nov 6-8
📍 Malta
Medica 2024
🕣 Nov 11-14
📍 Düsseldorf, Germany
BMJ Future Health 2024 - Use the code SOMXFH50 for a little Pigeon treat.
🕣 Nov 19-20
📍 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 🕵️♀️
📲 Associate Director, Global Regulatory Sciences, Precision Medicine & Digital Health – Few jobs in the pharma space could be as exciting as this one for someone with the relevant experience and a passion for digital health. If you consider yourself somewhat of a lifesciences regulatory expert with a background in leading teams, run don’t walk.
🩺 GP Lead, HeliosX Group – With a list of brands as long as your arm, HeliosX are quite the rising star in healthcare and healthtech – and they’re looking for a GP to own their dermatology, weight loss and other areas. If this sounds like your jam, why not strut on over and take a look. Or just click and apply. You do you.
⚙️ Tech Team Lead, MANUAL – Men’s health (and other areas too) experts MANUAL are on something of a hiring spree right now. IF you’re a healthtech expert with experience in leading teams, why not take a look at this exciting role. If you’re not a tech expert, go have a look at their hiring page…there’s quite a lot of roles up for grabs.
🧱 Senior Product Manager, Ally Health – If you believe clinical care should be as easy to access as ordering an Uber, and you’d like to own the products that make that vision a reality, here’s the role for you.
🧐 Head of Medical Device Clinical Research, Doccla – Doccla are fast becoming the biggest player in the virtual wards and remote care space, with expansions across Europe and serious investment behind them. This role is about bringing together the evidence needed to demonstrate alignment with regulatory standards and help continue their forward momentum.
❓Medical DIrector, Stealth startup – Oooh, it’s not every day a role like this shows up. This D2C healthtech company is building a lifelong health companion, offering comprehensive biomarker testing and trusted medical expertise through an AI-powered platform that creates hyper-personalised health journeys. If you’re a practising doctor interested in joining a startup alongside some healthtech heavy hitters, this could be the role for you. Drop an email over to arnzback@icloud.com to find out more.
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.