#272: Her Majesty’s (XR) Healthtech
The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX and kindly sponsored by Whereby - secure video calls for telehealth.
Hello healthtechies,
This week: A big HM Treasury cash dump, XR is back (had it ever gone?) and AI’s found the final corner of the care ecosystem to infiltrate…
🎙️ Fancy this newsletter, in podcast form, with some extra commentary to memorise and impress your friends? 👇 Well… James, Harry and Ross O’Brien talk all things XR in healthtech.
And it’s on YouTube if you like watching people have a conversation.
Integrating video calling into digital health can be a challenge and in reality, “good enough”, rarely is. Security gaps, clunky experiences, and unreliable connections all risk eroding patient trust. Whereby is different. For over a decade, we’ve partnered with healthcare professionals to move away from mediocre by delivering secure, reliable, and easy-to-use video consultations. Our flexible API makes it simple to embed video calls directly into your platform, reducing engineering overhead, leaving you to focus on what you do best.
News Bites 🥪
💰 £300M from HM Treasury Just In Time For Christmas: It’s for healthtech and, specifically, to be directed at automating administrative tasks. Now, apparently, hospital productivity has already risen 2.4% this year (how’s that been measured?), and the Treasury expects these efficiency gains to unlock £17bn over the next three years to reinvest in patient care (how you working that out?). Optimists will say there’s £300M more than yesterday targeted specifically at automating admin. Pessimists will say “NHS spending for 2024/2025 is estimated at £178 billion, £300 million is 0.17% of that.”
🗺️ An XR Treasure Map? Not Quite… But A Solid New Look At The UK Health Market: A major national report commissioned by the University of Liverpool and released this past week has provided the first comprehensive (and fancy, interactive) map of the UK’s burgeoning Extended Reality (XR) health sector. TL;DR, the XR uptake in universities is more than double that of adoption in the NHS, and it’s largely down to limited NHS procurement pathways and regulatory uncertainty. But - good news - there’s a plan: 6 strategic recommendations, no less, including the development of a unified National XR Strategy for Healthcare. Pigeon’s getting the Oculus back out of the cupboard. Features in this week’s Pigeon podcast.
😵 AI agents “lost” when patients ask medical questions: We’ve been talking a lot about autonomous, human-substituting healthcare AI bots, and here’s the latest: They’re now… confused? The one and only Ali Parsa voiced concerns on a recent TechEu podcast that so-called autonomous AI systems become “lost” when patients move beyond basic questions into complex medical queries, highlighting ongoing concerns around the limitations (and lack of regulatory ring-fencing). Could it be that we’re reaching a healthtech copilot nadir*? (Wired also seems to think we’d just all be better off as friends)
⚖️ WHO Ya Gonna Call? Not Ghostbusters…: Continuing the regulatory argument this week, it’s a timely coincidence perhaps that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued a warning re: the rapid adoption of AI in healthcare. Across Europe, they argue, AI deployment and uptake is moving faster than regulatory and legal systems can keep pace with. As such (and in a huge “are-you-joking-that-this-hasn’t-been-done-already?” moment) they are urging nations to create clear strategies and liability standards that will protect patients from technological, equity and safety failures when it comes to healthcare service delivery… 🤷🏻♂️
💜 Emm-believable Scenes In Menstrual Health Funding: Women’s health company, Emm, have announced their latest raise to the tune of £9 million to launch a world-first “smart” menstrual cup and connected app designed to objectively measure menstrual flow volume and key cycle metrics using integrated sensor technology. The aim is to bridge the major data gap in women’s health (see the past few weeks and podcasts discussing female healthcare censorship across major web platforms) and transform reproductive health research.
🌱 $27M for Women’s Health ‘Supplements with Clinical Rigour’: If you’d said ‘supplements’ to Pigeon a couple of years ago, you wouldn’t be getting near this newsletter, but the Bryan Johnson trickle-down is becoming too big to ignore. You might call it longevity, or you might just call it finding what we’re lacking and replacing it. The problem is finding ourselves at, what Alex Taylor, Co-Founder of Perelel describes as… “breaking point, with influencer-led brands and unproven product claims.” The shift to scientific rigour in the supplements market is welcomed wholeheartedly by Pigeon. Perelel talks a good game and is offering women support from ‘preconception through perimenopause.’
🔮 35 Stats for the Future of Virtual Care in 2026 and Beyond - It’s that time of year again… tinsel, mulled wine, carol tweeting and predictions for the 12 months ahead. While this Pigeon has been busy planning its annual flight south for sunnier climes, our friends at Whereby have pulled together an insightful TLDR from telehealth professionals across the world, including clinicians, executives, developers, and product leaders, on how the industry is performing and where it’s headed next.
What to Listen to 🔊
Tjasa had Ali Parsa on her pod this week - worth a listen if you want to hear about Quadrivia 👆🏼
I (James) had Oscar on 👆🏼. He’s an ex-doctor, now founder of Deaku, which is a SaaS product for the creator economy. Loads in here about creating content in the healthtech space.
Tara Humphrey, the host of The Business of Healthcare podcast, recently and tragically lost her 13 year old daughter, Tahlia, to a hypoglycaemic brain injury. This episode honours her as Tara reshares her conversation with Partha Karr, NHS England’s Type 1 Diabetes & Technology Lead 💙
Events 📅
RSNA Annual Meeting 2025
📅 Nov 30 - 4 Dec
📍 Chicago, Illinois
GIANT Health
📅 Dec 8 - 9
📍 London
Google x NXGN Xmas Party (subscribe to them here for signup link access!)
📅 Dec 11
📍 London
Then… Happy Holidays! 🎄
Radical Health
📅 Jan 19 - 21
📍 Helsinki, Finland
… and more to follow in 2026!
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.
💡Head of Clinical Innovation at BUPA: BUPA London is on the hunt for a Head of Clinical Innovation Services. Could this be you? Tap the apply button if you’re someone with a thirst for building big and novel in the private healthcare ecosystem.
🩺 General Practitioner at Neko: Want to work for healthcare Spotify (well, not quite, but it’s Daniel Ek’s latest venture baby)? They’re currently hiring for GPs in their super-fancy-futuristic clinics in London, with a view to expand across Europe in 2026 and beyond.
🎮 Gamer In Residence at Great Ormond Street Hospital: Send this one to your gamer friends, and no special healthcare qualifications required: You’re being paid to play games, basically. But it’s also constructive and comes with the kudos of helping patients at one of the world’s most renowned paediatric hospitals.
🌐 Head of International Expansion at HeliosX: Reporting into VP International, this role is responsible for all phases of market entry, evaluating the opportunity, developing the right operating model and getting the business live, driving core workstreams and mobilising all departments across the business for launch.
🐨 Testosterone Lead at Eucalyptus: Hot on the heels of other D2C men’s health cos, UK & Aussie-based Eucalyptus are hiring for a role delivering specialised care, education, and support for men navigating testosterone deficiency and working to make healthcare more accessible, personalised, and safe.
* Nadir is a good word to know in healthcare. It means the lowest or most unsuccessful point in a situation. So you might say… “laughing at that joke in Pigeon was the nadir of my day.” But it’s also used a lot in medicine to indicate the progression to the lowest point of a clinical symptom or a laboratory count. In oncology, for example, nadir is used to represent the lowest level of a white cell count while a patient is undergoing chemotherapy.