#228 - A brief respite from doom and gloom.
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by Whereby - secure video calls for telehealth.
Hi friends,
This week: Why your nan loves healthtech, AI’s assault on clinicians’ autonomy, and is it too soon to predict an IPO boom? (spoiler: yes.)
It’s 2025. You’ve been saying you need to get into podcasts. Why not start by 👀 listening to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ James from SomX breaks down the best stories from this week’s newsletter with Whereby’s Howard Wu and Accurx’s Jacob Haddad. 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 🥪
📈 Medical Device IPOs Could Revive Health Tech Listings – In healthtech, it’s all doom and gloom until somebody goes public. After a, let’s face it, slightly dismal year for companies making it to the IPO stage, two companies developing technologies to treat cardiac conditions appear to be planning to list. One of them (Heartflow) abandoned a previous attempt to list via SPAC back in 2022, so Pigeon’s wishing them second time lucky in 2025. Can the rest of us draw any conclusions about what this means for healthtech? Probably not. It’s January.
📲 Patient portals top digital health tech use in older adults, survey finds – Your mum and your nan both love healthtech, and who can blame them? What do they love the most? Patient portals. Why? That’s (disappointingly) not entirely clear from this survey. What is clear is the stark differences between black and hispanic people not using the tech compared with others.
🏴 Helen Thomas: ‘Are our systems ready for the next pandemic? No.’ – Wales is home to some of Pigeon’s favourite people, and it’s safe to say we can add DHCW’s Helen Thomas to that list. It's hard to imagine many other people working at a senior level speaking with quite such candour about the challenges they face. Come for the headline, stay for the nerdy facts about data standards, post-covid workarounds and GP records software pluralism.
👀 AI could help diagnose dementia through eye tests – Someone (Google wouldn’t tell us who) once said the eyes are the window to the soul. The NeurEYE research team are here to prove you can get a decent peak at the brain through them too. Routine examinations could help identity dementia earlier and help patients and carers to plan their futures better.
📼 ‘Humphrey' government AI assistant looks to slash UK public sector red tape – We’re not sure what it says about the Government’s view of consultants that it believes deploying an AI assistant to civil servants and NHS staff is the best way to reduce consultancy spend, nor can we get our heads around the idea that it's named after a fictional, machievellian civil servant obsessed with maintaining the status quo at all costs. We hope NHS admin and operational staff find value from it at some point, but we remained perplexed.
🤖 Digital health coaching platform Numan launches AI assistant – One of the most prominent digital healthcare providers has revealed the AI platform it says will support its weight management service and detailed how and when the AI gets involved and when it hands over to a human for input. Hopefully it’s just as seamless a handover as when Pigeon hands over to our human for input.
🚨 AI Threatens To Further Erode Physician Autonomy – For as long as we’ve had computers designed to measure performance or make decisions (or at least designed to appear to do so), we’ve been faced with computers that tell us we’re doing things wrong if we deviate from certain parameters. One lesser explored question lingering around the use of AI in healthcare is whether that problem may actually get worse as AI plays a greater role in every aspect of care delivery.
🕵️♀️ Clue's CEO Rhiannon White on the Future of Femtech and PCOS – As the product leader at womens health app Clue steps up to CEO, she shares her take on how the app is helping with the diagnosis and treatment challenges for PCOS and other conditions, and how she sees the company’s role in closing the data gap for under-researched and under diagnosed conditions.
🔬 Lindus Health raises $55M to 'fix the broken clinical trial industry' – It feels like just yesterday Lindus announced its Series A, alongside the backing of US tech magnate Peter Thiel. Less than 18 months and 35000 enrolled patients later, they add a significant boost to their coffers, while preparing to swap their UK HQ for new digs in the US….which, as a UK-based Pigeon, is a bit of a downer.
💸 Percipio: AI-Based Population Health Monitoring Platform Raises $20 Million – If healthcare’s ever going to move to a preventative approach, effective population health management approaches will be critical, and Percipio’s picked up a heap of cash that says investors agree. Pigeon can’t argue with the motive, but from the “no-medical-devices-involved” to the challenges of population health management when access is still an issue, we’ve got a ton of questions to add to that cash heap.
👤 Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raises $260m and expands to the US – Neko’s accessible bodyscanning tech has got the healthtech world talking. Thousands of people are on the waitlist and, less than 6 months after the company opened its doors in London, Neko is making the leap to the US. Expansion and growth at this rate is always exciting to watch, but can they sustain this trajectory?
📹 The Evolution of Telehealth: A New Era of Patient Care – Just as in-person care relies on physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure plays a vital role in the delivery of virtual care and telehealth services. Whereby, video call specialist for telehealth, explores how telehealth has been shaped both by patient demand and improvements in patient and clinician experience that have been enabled by digital infrastructure.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
Arab Health
🕣 Jan 27-30
📍 Dubai World Trade Centre
The Festival of Genomics & Biodata
🕣 Jan 29-30
📍 London
London’s TechBio Revolution
🕣 Jan 29
📍 London
HSJ Digital Transformation Summit
🕣 Feb 6-7
📍 Birmingham
Radiology AI Summit
🕣 Feb 11-13
📍 London
HETT Show North
🕣 Feb 26
📍 Manchester
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 🕵️♀️
🏃♀️ Participants, EMMA Study to advance endometriosis research – Chronic pelvic pain platform Lasa Health are seeking women to take part in an important study that will push forward and hopefully lead to better data and outcomes for those living with the condition. Sign up and share your experiences.
💊 Lead Pharmacist, Dosium – If you’re a pharmacist with a commercial mindset, Dosium may have the role for you. As the pharmacy startup sets out to scale their Touchdose medicine-dosing product across the NHS, they’re looking for someone who can support implementation of the product with customers, build new relationships and help translate customer feedback into product evolution.
👨💻 Behavioral Scientist, Digital Health (all genders) – For those Switzerland-based digital health data fiends in Pigeon’s followers (don’t act all coy, we know you’re there), Merck’s healthcare division is looking for someone to help design digital interventions that make an impact. (We’re not 100% sure why gender was mentioned in the job title or how it could possibly be relevant, but we’re going to gloss over it for now.
📊 Senior Insights Manager, Digital Health – Pigeon can’t help but feel all the telecoms operators are exploring opportunities in digital health right now. After all, its super exciting. If you’re an expert, go and give GSMA some advice on the opportunities in the space.
🦀 Software Architect, iQ Healthtech – keen to be involved in building scaleable technology that supports HCPs to deliver chemotherapy treatments? iQ are looking for a software engineer to work on their flagship product.
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.