#223 - May the best Pigeon win 🏆
Brought to you by SomX - despite running a comms agency, we're widely known as just 'the ones that do Pigeon.'
Hi friends,
This week: The battle of the LLMs, the Great British public share their views on technology in healthcare , and we answer a critical question… Is AI all it cracks up to be?
Love healthtech, hate reading? 👀 Listen to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Belle, James and Amy from SomX break down the best stories from this week’s newsletter. Available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
News Bites 🥪
🩸 London’s Universal Care Plan recognised for its support to improve care for sickle cell disease – If you ask Pigeon, sickle cell care is in need of major improvements and London’s Universal Care Plan gets it. By actually listening to patients (groundbreaking) and helping doctors provide smarter, kinder care, it’s tackling the “it can’t be that painful” dismissals that too many with sickle cell, sadly, have to endure.
🩻 How can NHS diagnostic imaging adopt AI more quickly? – AI was supposed to replace radiologists by now, right? Well, they’re still in a job, but with 1.6 million patients waiting for scans, clinical teams in Greater Manchester have rapidly deployed a single, unified imaging system across the whole of the region’s acute trusts. It has a marketplace with a portfolio of AI applications (fancy), so algorithms can easily be evaluated, deployed and used by clinicians. It’s all in the cloud which means trusts can skip some technical stuff and there’s some data thing that’s already done too.
🧠 Measuring brain activity with a hair friendly temporary “e-tattoo” – As Kim Kardashian-West once famously said: “You wouldn’t put a bumper sticker on a Bentley, but I would put an e-tattoo on my scalp to monitor brainwaves and diagnose neurological conditions.” Inspired by Kim K, scientists have designed a liquid ink (what other state can be ink in?) that flows through hair and settles as a thin-film sensor, offering a smarter way to track brain activity in comparison to traditional EEGs - no glue, no wires, no hassle… and no hair loss to get it done.
❓ Why are doctors wary of wearables? – All this talk of wearables lately, and Pigeon hasn’t received a single free device. Alas, this week, even the BBC are reporting that wearables are ‘building a society of hypochondria.’ Sure, wearables can encourage good habits, but can they really catch life-threatening health conditions? And at what societal cost?
🏆 ChatGPT-4 outperforms others in medical AI model comparison – In a battle of the LLM’s, GPT-4 came out on top. Most models, even those trained specifically on medical data, actually guessed answers at random (wtf). But GPT-4 scored a solid 60%. The study showed that even specialised medical models struggle with the complexity of medical codes, while general-purpose models like GPT-4 can outperform them. It’s giving… the Beyoncé of the group?
👋 This five-minute brain scan could reveal risk of psychosis in patients - Here’s what you need to know – TL;DR: Researchers discovered that in people with psychosis, some brain regions aren’t connecting properly. By analysing the MRI scans of 159 participants, they identified a “somato-visual” biomarker - essentially, a sign of abnormal brain connectivity in two key networks. This biomarker could help detect psychosis before symptoms show up, meaning earlier treatment and better outcomes for those at risk. That is healthtexcellent.
📢 How does the public feel about health technologies and data? – Half the public (51%) think tech improves healthcare, 8% think it makes it worse. Either 41% are on the fence, or more likely, the tech broke, or it was too slow, or it wasn’t interoperable, or there wasn’t wifi, or answers needed to be faxed in, or <insert other NHS tech jokes>. Interestingly, public trust in the NHS with health data is high and 75% of the public are happy to share at least some of their data for the development of AI systems in the NHS. A very thorough report and well worth a read.
🥼 Dr. AI will see you now– Pigeon must admit: it’s been swooning over AI’s potential in healthcare but largely forgetting a crucial detail - AI needs solid infrastructure to work. And in many parts of the world, that foundation is still missing. For AI to live up to its promise, we need secure data management, interoperability, and robust digital strategies. The big question remains: can AI actually deliver global health improvements without the right groundwork?
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
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 🕵️♀️
👩💻 Senior Backend Engineer, Healthily – If designing, building and delivering backend systems sounds like your idea of a good time, why not apply for this role over at Healthily? You’ll get to code to your hearts content and showcase your collaboration skills. Win-win.
📈 Senior Product Manager, Flo Health – If you can ensure Flo delivers content that keeps users engaged and drives growth, this one’s for you. Bonus points if you can collaborate with engineering, marketing, and operations to bring your expertise in automation to the table.
☁️ Software Engineer (Cloud), Skin Analytics – Pigeon once attempted to navigate platforms like JavaScript, Node.js, and TypeScript. It did not go well. If, for you, it would go well, join the best skin analytics company in the game. I forget their name.
👏 Project Management Team Lead, Pando – If you have top-tier leadership and team management skills, exceptional problem-solving abilities, and a knack for staying organised, then it’s Pando (with an ‘o’ not an ‘a’) you want to apply to. Interestingly, a panda is probably the opposite of a startup. No sense of urgency whatsoever. Nightmare to work for. Or maybe quite nice actually.
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.