#232 - Cutting off your nose to spite your face
The one-minute healthtech roundup, kindly sponsored by Whereby - secure video calls for telehealth.
Hi friends,
This week: What do healthtech VCs want? What do FDA cuts mean for reviews and approvals going forward? What can we do to make AI more trustworthy?
Your friends all listen to podcasts. Be interesting at your next dinner party by listening to the Healthtech Pigeon podcast ➡️ Amy and Huw from SomX break down the best stories from this week’s newsletter, with the help of CTeL’s Crista Natoli 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 🥪
💎 The ‘Hidden Gem’ Healthtech Areas VCs Have Their Eye On – *When compared to other sectors*, investors went all in on healthtech in Europe last year. Whether this can be seen as a positive for healthtech or a shocking indictment of ALL other technology is a question we’ll leave up to you. But as savvy investors look to build on the small wins of last year, here are the things they’re fixating on in 2025.
🔬 Single patient record data will be available to researchers by default – The painful truth in UK healthcare? Step across an invisible border and somehow none of the doctors know who you are or anything about your health woes. The single patient record may be the fix, but it could make population-level research easier too.
👎 Most patients do not trust health systems to use AI responsibly – Recent UK surveys found a mixed picture when it came to public trust in the use of AI in healthcare. Now, newly published US figures show that US patients also have, shall we say….reservations. Women and those who faced discrimination were most significant in their lack of trust, but across the board, there’s some trust-building exercises to do.
👍 FUTURE-AI: international consensus guideline for trustworthy and deployable artificial intelligence in healthcare – Speaking of which: It’s not the first framework, we doubt it will be the last, but a new framework published by an international consortium believes its cracked the key for ensuring that we know how to choose and use AI in a way that works.
✂️ FDA staff were reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company. DOGE just fired them – The extensive FDA personnel cuts over the President’s day weekend are just the latest in a line of concerning interventions in US federal healthcare policy and regulation made by the new administration. While reviewers in the unit reviewing Neuralink submissions are affected, there’s no indication that they were targeted, nor what impact this will have on overall FDA timelines.
🛫 Paperplane Therapeutics raises $1.5M to treat anxiety and pain with medical VR – Study after study tell us that VR can help reduce the worst of what patients experience in painful or anxiety inducing procedures. Paperplane’s picked up a health dose of cash to commercialise this approach in dentistry.
🍎 Apple study will look at the role tech can play in health – Apple has been flogging expensive phones and watches to people for nearly fifteen years on the promise that they can help you optimise your health (if Pigeon sounds flippant, we’re not. We’re fully bought in). But a new study aims to take this to its logical conclusion: using that tech to help predict longer term health conditions and manage interventions.
⛓️💥 Women's healthcare is broken – I started my business to fix it – What’s wrong with our current approach to women’s health? Almost too much, but Hormona CEO Karolina Löfqvist insightfully summarises her views and advice for companies aiming to break into this space.
🫁 Qureight core imaging platform deployed within Vicore Phase 2b ASPIRE study of buloxibutid for IPF — How do you solve a problem like trial data? Qureight are having a damn good go at it. So good that their existing partners Vicore have expanded a partnership to help further quantify the impact of their new drug for patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
📹 Why Whereby’s API is the Trusted Solution for Leading Telehealth Platforms — Video calls are a cornerstone of the telehealth revolution most of us have experienced over the last five years. Telehealth providers require secure, reliable and seamless video calling to provide high quality services to their patients. Here the team at Whereby share the story of how they became a leading video call service for healthcare providers, used by platforms including Accurx and DrDoctor, continually optimising for use in telehealth along the way.
What to listen to 🔊
Events 📅
HSJ Digital Transformation Summit
🕣 Feb 6-7
📍 Birmingham
HETT Show North
🕣 Feb 26
📍 Manchester
Innovation and Technology Conference and Exhibition 2024
🕣 Feb 27
📍 The Royal Society of Medicine, London
AIMday HealthTech
🕣 Feb 29
📍 📍The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
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 🕵️♀️
📜 Business Development Manager - Medtech & Life Science, Superscript – A role in selling insurance solutions to business may not have been what you came to the Pigeon jobs section for, but Superscript work with some pretty great companies in healthcare. Now they’re looking for someone with the BD chops and industry awareness to help further build that profile and customer base.
⌚️ Hardware and Firmware Engineer – Wearable MedTech Platform, Transdermal diagnostics – Engineers, step forward. If you want to help build the nitty gritty technical stuff inside the wearables of the future, this is the place and role for you.
❤️ Clinical Consultant Abiomed - South West - Johnson & Johnson MedTech – Practicising clinician? Want to help J&J and their Abiomed partners implement solutions designed to improve cardiovascular care. Abiomed is looking for someone to travel across the South West, guiding users on their tech.
🤔 Senior Analyst – Healthcare Strategy Consulting, Princeton Biopartners – If you know what ‘integrated strategy projects’ and you’re passionate about healthcare, this is probably the role for you.
💿 Assistant Digital Transformation Manager, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust – Few providers are doing transformation work at the scale that the Centre for Innovation, Transformation, and Improvement team do, so any one looking to work on genuinely exciting projects is unlikely to find a better place to do it than here.
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.