#222 - The Healthtech Honesty Hour ⏰
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by SciQ: Healthtech recruitment, by ex-industry professionals.
Hi friends,
This week: AI under the spotlight, the answer to the healthtech funding crisis, PocDoc makes history and Pigeon makes a confession.
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Belle, Jessica and James from SomX break down 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 🥪
1️⃣ PocDoc injects £5M for health checks in under 10 minutes: Largest UK Pre-A raise in digital health – Put simply, raising the largest-ever Pre-A funding round in digital health is the kind of achievement you brag about over Christmas dinner to claim your position as the superior sibling — or is that just what Pigeon would do? A big round of applause to PocDoc, whose funding will fuel the growth of their at-home testing kits and AI-powered app, helping users assess their health quickly and gain actionable insights.
🤖 Why AI may not help decrease radiologists’ burnout – This could get awkward. Perhaps predictably, if you’re already overloaded, you don’t have much experience or expertise in AI, and you’re told to use AI to get through your tasks….it doesn’t do much for your state of mind. Could pushing AI on people who are too busy to learn how to use it throw a spanner in the works of the healthtech revolution? Probably. Will we do it anyway and use examples like this one as evidence that tech isn’t yielding in-year ROI? Absolutely.
👀 Friend Or Foe? A Look At Big Tech's Impact In The Digital Health Space – From glucose monitoring on Apple Watches to AI-powered insights from Google, big tech continues to make bigger moves in health…but can they dethrone the incumbents already leading this space. This Pigeon reckons there’s plenty of room for collaboration, and who knows, maybe even a little friendly competition. Just leave some room for the little guys too.
🔮 AI tool could predict type 2 diabetes 10 years in advance — Imperial’s team continue to blow predictive health modelling out of the water, again using AI to tease out insights from electrocardiograms to predict long term patient outcomes. One day they’ll be able use ECGs to determine whether you’re predisposed to delusions of being a pigeon; it may come too late for us, but think of the lives it could save.
🤫 Many digital health startups are quietly raising down rounds and closing up shop. Here's why – How many great ideas will we lose because companies will never meet expectations set in an investment boom (2021) that bears little resemblance to the realities of life just 3 years on? After the pandemic transformed healthtech from a long-term investment play into a short-term hype bubble overnight, many companies are still wading through the murky waters created as a result.
👾 Avatar therapy could help patients manage hallucinations – Avatar? Pigeon never saw it. Too unsettling. Also, if we had half a million dollars to spend on avatar technology, we’d spend it on something more interesting than a Pocahontas remake*…like this innovative therapy designed to help people living with schizophrenia or other psychosis-related conditions. This approach allows patients to create digital representations of the voices they hear and confront them in therapist-led, three-way conversations.
🚺 Why Are Women’s Health Startups Growing In Europe and North America? – A question asked, and we would argue, not really answered here, but nonetheless the evidence of a turnaround is striking. Perhaps the real question is still ‘why aren’t women’s health startups growing everywhere else in the world!?’
💰 AI meets employee wellness: Kyan Health lifts $16.7M to tackle absenteeism and boost performance – First Mo, then Kai: are one-syllable AI care-navigation tools (chatbots) the future of user engagement with their health? (If so, then give Pigeon a week, we’ll be ready). Kyan Health hopes to transform workplace mental health care by replacing outdated, reactive wellness programs with proactive, AI-powered solutions. We’re not so sure about the “sharing insights with employers” bit, but we’ll hold our concerns for now.
🥳 Malte Gerhold: ‘We need to make implementation and adoption exciting’ – Take it from Pigeon: a shiny new toy isn’t always the answer. With the NHS grappling with challenges like AI adoption and tech overload, the Health Foundation’s Director of Innovation calls for a shift toward making technology work for the people on the ground, not just showcasing flashy solutions. Long story short: Innovation is exciting, but real change happens when it works in practice.
…and finally, Remember Alan, the health insurtech that revealed their AI chatbot Mo last week? We felt the news story was lacking some important details about Mo’s status as a medical device and the role of clinicians in reviewing the answers given to patients. In response, they slid into Pigeon’s comments section with a complete breakdown of how it all works, and the results of their study of its use. Pay attention healthtechs, this is how to respond when nerds ask you for detail.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
Medfit 2024
🕣 Dec 3-4
📍 Lille, France
Healthtech Forward
🕣 Dec 4-5
📍 Barcelona, Spain
Healthtech Investor Summit
🕣 Dec 4-6
📍 Bruges, Belgium
GIANT Health
🕣 Dec 9-10
📍 London
Next Med Health
🕣 Dec 10-13
📍 San Diego, USA
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 🕵️♀️
👩🔬 Clinical and Regulatory Lead, Doccla – This is the kind of role someone will see and either: a) run for the hills or b) gasp with glee. If you happen to be a part of the latter group, why not funnel your clinical skills and regulatory panache into the development and validation of SaMDs for use in remote patient monitoring?
🎨 Product Designer, Patchwork Health – Are you a problem solver? Do you have a background in both UX and UI? Do you have excellent design skills? Are you tired of Pigeon asking you questions? Fair enough…we’ll stop.
📈 Implementation Manager, Peppy – Now this is a role for the natural born leader, someone who can take ownership over a task and get things done! Sound like you? Why not join Peppy on their journey to building the world’s most advanced benefits management platform.
✅ Commercial Lead, DrDoctor– If you have a proven track record in sales, experience in developing and implementing long-term strategies that deliver measurable results, and a deep understanding of the NHS and its procurement processes, Pigeon has a surprise (or at least a nice job) for you!
*This would be devastating, relevant and topical satire, were it still 2009.
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.