#226 - Through a glass, digitally.
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by SciQ: Healthtech recruitment, by ex-industry professionals.
Hi friends,
This week: All the best healthtech from CES, a big push on NHS tech to start the year, and what does an AI officer do, anyway?
It’s 2025. You’ve been saying you need to get into podcasts. Why not start by 👀 listening to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Huw, Belle and Amy 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 🥪
🪞 Withings unveils body-scanning mirror at CES 2025 – At this time of year, Pigeon doesn’t care about your predictions – we care about the mad concept devices you actually went and built. And there’s no better place to start than January’s festival of consumer tech CES. First up is Withings, with a mirror that Pigeon can admit is pretty clever, but that we couldn’t conceive of looking at ourselves in this soon after Christmas.
👶 Women's health tech brand Elvie is expanding into sleep products – Elvie also used CES as an opportunity to launch a new product – a smart baby bouncer that pigeon-reading parents will no doubt welcome, until your baby inexplicably decides their favourite programmed soothing pattern doesn’t work anymore. We’re only slightly curious about remotely bouncing a baby via app, but if it works for you, then you’ll get no judgement from us.
❤️ AI tool to help identify atrial fibrillation risk trialled in Leeds – Introducing FIND-AF (in this setting, AF standard for Atrial fibrillation. If you see it elsewhere, it probably means something else). The algorithm rummages through your GP records and gives you a heads up (and an ECG machine, if you want it), if it thinks you’re likely to develop AF in the future.
👉 Twentyeight Health picks up $10M, inks partnerships with Medicaid insurers – A chunky raise sees the sexual and reproductive health care provider expanding its reach, in the process seeking to address an access-to-care issue for Americans on lower incomes.
💻 Government to develop NHS shared digital platform for medical info – Is Pigeon the only one with a sense of deja vu? We know this announcement is new, but we might not have the details we need to know how it’s new – or how it will work. That said, news like this comes with targets, including the deadline for trusts to give elective patients the ability to view and manage appointments digitally.
🤖 Kaiser Permanente's new head of AI on 'two fundamental shifts' the technology will enable – You can’t have missed them: Heads of AI, Chief AI Officers, AI champions – a rare job title 5 years ago, but not every big hospital wants one. What do they do, you ask? Ask Kaiser Permanente’s Dr Daniel Yang, who shares his day-to-day priorities and some critical views on whether the technology will have the greatest impact.
😷 VitVio secures €1.8 million for AI-powered operating rooms in hospitals – Every time Pigeon’s been in for surgery recently, everyone seems very calm. VitVio aims to make them calmer, by using an AI to improve safety, minimise human error, and ultimately to keep its robot eye (sorry, computer vision) firmly on the proverbial-ball.
🏥 Healthtech startups making healthcare delivery better for doctors and patients – Pigeon’s aware we spend quite a lot of time talking about how difficult it is for innovative companies to make an impact in healthcare. That’s not going to go away in 2025, but we thought a few examples of success might start the year off right.
💊 2024 Was The Year Weight-Loss Drugs Took Over – If your starting to feel like every company is now a weight loss company, you’re not far off the mark. From positive noises about GLP-1s in 2023 to complete dominance in the media by the end of last year, it’s clear the appetite for weight loss drugs was there, and a few notable companies met the demand. Stock prices went up (and down), competitors emerged, and it feels like 2025 could be more of the same.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
JP Morgan Healthcare
🕣 Jan 13-16
📍 San Francisco
Health Innovation Wessex - Health Innovation Programme
🕣 Jan 21
📍 Southampton
Arab Health
🕣 Jan 27-30
📍 Dubai World Trade Centre
The Festival of Genomics & Biodata
🕣 Jan 29-30
📍 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 🕵️♀️
💊 Operations Manager, Roczen – If you’re a problem solving ops specialist (or you’ve got a consulting background), then Roczen could be worth an application. You’ll be tightening ways of working a team aiming to help patients manage Type 2 diabetes with personalised support.
🎬 Associate Director, GRA Precision Medicine & Digital Health – An impressive job title for an equally impressive candidate. If you’ve led global development programmes and meet the spec required, this one’s for you.
💸 Private Equity Analyst, Lauxera Capital Partners – Its not every day private equity roles in healthcare come up, so if you’ve got the skills, background and inclination for this pretty prestigious firm, walk don’t run
🦟 Digital Health Specialist, Malaria Consortium – If you’ve got a passion for global health and a great understanding of what’s happening in digital (you do read this newsletter, so you’re doing better than most), this is one of the most unique roles we’ve featured in recent weeks. Go get it!
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.