#269: 70% of NHS digital tools have no legal safety sign-off
The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX
Hi friends,
This week, ?illegal tech runs rampant in the NHS, new pre-eclampsia biomarker test backed by Gates and electrical stimulation through the ear reduces heavy menstrual bleeding (yep - it’s a peer reviewed study, folks).
🎙️ Fancy this in podcast form? James and Keith Grimes chat about the study at the top of this edition (that Keith authored), highlighting the lack of legal safety documentation around most of the NHS’ digital tools.
And it’s on YouTube if you like that kinda thing.
News Bites 🥪
🏥 The NHS’s “Wild West” of 10,000 Unchecked Health Apps: Here we go. A bombshell new study in JMIR has deeped (it’s a Gen Z term, we’re trying to modernise folks)* the NHS’ use of digital health technologies, and the findings are striking (to say the least): The national cross-sectional study found that the average NHS organisation is juggling about 83 different health apps and tools, and a staggering 70% of these DHTs have no documented assurance against mandatory clinical safety standards. With more than 10,000 digital tools highlighted to be operating with no paper trail that explicitly prove their safety, this is very much a when, not if, harm occurs situation.
🔔 Oura’s Partnership With the Pentagon Is Ringing Alarm Bells for Customers - The CEO of wearable giant Oura, Tom Hale, has been under fire for a less-than-transparent partnerships with the U.S. government. Hale has repeatedly denied that Oura sells or shares data without express consent from its users to third-party orgs (including government agencies as well as analytics firms) and has been at pains to stress Oura’s vision for a “cloud of wearables”, where devices work together to provide health insights as a one-stop user shop.
🩸 A Gates-Backed Test for Pre-eclampsia That Fits in Your Pocket: Pigeon mentioned last week that Melinda French-Gates’ funded startup, Tia, was laying off a bunch of its staff, but in more positive and recent news, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced women’s health startup, Lepzi, are getting a bumper grant from their cloisters to help build a point-of-care diagnostic for pre-eclampsia. It’s a low-cost, simple test for PLGF and sFlt-1 biomarkers from a finger-prick, and it could genuinely save millions of lives by moving a complex diagnostic out of the hospital and into communities, globally.
🤖 Why Your Hospital’s Bigger AI Is Not Always Better: A new Forbes analysis is doing the rounds, arguing that 90% of hospital tasks (like summarising doctor notes or flagging a lab result) are less effective and less efficient than initially thought with the whopper LLMs, and that the smaller, domain-specific purpose-built models come in cheaper, faster, less likely to hallucinate and are (critically) safer. We’re all for the AI revolution here at Pigeon, but very much in the sense of a right-tool-for-the-job approach, as is the interesting case made here.
🤫 Shhh! The AI Scribe Is Listening: So it transpires that a lot of clinical AI scribes are highly vulnerable to background sounds: Microphone distance, dogs barking, conversations with friends (Sally Rooney reference, anyone?)*** and even heavy rain can cause AI to make “significant errors and omissions” in patient EHRs. Without proper setup (like dedicated mics) and clinicians diligently proofreading every note, this could be worsening the very problems the tech was intended to solve in the first place.****
📲 Clue Now Comes With... the Pill? In a brilliant “why didn’t anyone do this sooner?” move, the globally popular period-tracking app Clue has partnered with the healthcare platform Evaro. UK users can now order free NHS contraception directly from the app, delivered carrier-pigeon style direct to their door. Genius AND convenient.
🎧 Are You Hearing This? In other awesomely innovative women’s health news, OhmBody has put out a new peer-reviewed study on its ear-based wearable that was shown to reduce heavy menstrual bleeding (yes, you read that right). The device uses transcutaneous auricular neurostimulation (tAN) to send gentle electrical pulses to the vagus and trigeminal nerves in the ear, and which works to regulate pathways that control blood clotting and flow. This is a completely new and - sigh of relief - non-invasive approach to managing what remains a very common and disruptive problem for women worldwide.
What to Listen to 🔊
👆🏼 Flow Neuroscience is an incredibly interesting company. Absolutely loved talking to the founder, Daniel, about his journey. We also geeked out on the technology (tDCS) so those of you into your neuroscience and/or neurotech will love this one.
👆🏼 Musty with yet another blockbuster. An awesome listen.
Events 📅
Modern Healthtech Marketing - Psychology, Culture & AI
📅 Nov 19
📍 Hale House, London, UK
On 19th November at Hale House, Jessica and I are running a hands-on session for healthtech founders and leaders. In a market racing to adopt AI, the advantage in comms and marketing is still human: clarity, credibility and connection; psychology, culture and timing. We’ll show you how to build and execute a communications strategy, where to use AI for speed without losing authenticity, and how psychology and culture shape what gets noticed and believed. You’ll leave with a practical checklist you can action the next day. Spaces are limited - reserve a spot below.
MedTech World Malta 2025
📅 Nov 12 - 14
📍 Malta
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: President’s Conference 2025
📅 Nov 114
📍 Online & at Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow
Medica
📅 Nov 17 - 20
📍 Dusseldorf, Germany
Leaders in Health Summit
📅 Nov 18
📍 London
MEDevice Silicon Valley
📅 Nov 20
📍 California USA
Slush 2025
📅 Nov 19 - 20
📍 Finland
The NHS - Fit for the future- a masterclass for innovators
📅 Nov 25
📍 London
Healthtech Forward
📅 Dec 2 - 4
📍 Barcelona
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🗞️ 3 roles at SomX: If you’re into communications / marketing and think you could handle the kind of chat in this newsletter every weekday (except every other Friday, we work a 9-day-fortnight), then apply here. We help healthtech, biotech and pharma companies with everything you can think of, comms- and marketing-wise, and we’re looking for a PR specialist and two juniors across content and PR to help us with some very cool new clients. DM me (James) if you have any questions.
💪 Digital MSK Physiotherapist at EQL: A role designed for those that want to handle the complex cases that EQL’s AI flags, and in doing so providing not only top-tier remote care but using your clinical brain to make the algorithm smarter and better for patients.
🤖 Partnerships Manager at Heidi: Heidi are on an upward trajectory and want their AI scribe to get absolutely everywhere, and this role is aimed to help them do exactly that: Building partnerships to embed their tech directly into the EHRs and telehealth platforms that doctors and AHPs are already working with.
🧪 Workplace Partner at Isomorphic Labs: A role that isn’t about the tech per se, but about making the physical London office for Alphabet’s AI drug discovery moonshot a world-class environment, and freeing their scientists up to focus on important tasks (like curing diseases).
🔧 Senior Product Operations Manager at Flo: Fancy working at the #1 women’s health app worldwide? Sure you do. This role is all about building the processes, tools, and data that helps the product managers and engineers build and ship new features faster and more efficiently.
And on another note…
HSJ Digital Awards | Entries open - Deadline Friday 14 November
Are you a healthtechy or an NHSer that has done a thing? Well, you should win an award for that thing. The HSJ Digital Awards 2026 is out to recognise the NHS’ most ground-breaking digital projects, services, and teams.
There are 25 categories around improving patient experience, driving innovation, and boosting productivity, so if you’re not doing one of those, then, frankly what on earth are you doing otherwise.
📌 Enter here (it’s free)
🔎 View the categories and download the entry guide
Notes from the editor (James):
* This is what happens when I let Grace write the newsletter.
** Pulse is the name of every healthtech product beyond a certain number of people in the sign-off process.
*** Googled this and still absolutely no idea. But, lesson for you, I’ve left it in for two reasons: (1) High chance I’m in the minority - in terms of popular culture, I’m in the Miss Rachel, Paddington Bear phase of life. (2) Part of good leadership is not micromanaging. It’s important that Pigeon recruits express themselves.
**** It’ll be interesting to reflect on your reaction to this one. Was it (a) AI scribes are rubbish and need to be banned / get better… or was it… (b) in that case, let’s set up consultations to collect the highest possible quality audio…. The ‘faster horses’ trope gets tired when you’ve worked in tech/innovation as long as I have, but, overlaying AI onto all our current processes will make the horses as fast as they can be… but at some point, should we think about how we could redesign in the presence of available tech (replace the horse with a car)?