#275: Regulators, unite!
The one-minute healthtech roundup, brought to you by SomX and kindly sponsored by Cogniss’ Ripple: A digital health challenge for women’s health.
Hello healthtechies,
This week: AI… the source of, and solution to, all of our problems.
🎙️ Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? 👇 Well… click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify.
And it’s on YouTube if you’re young and cool, or old and like watching humans interact.
This Autumn, The Ripple Women’s Digital Health Challenge 2025 invited innovators around the world to win a 12-month bootcamp for turning ideas into pilot-ready, patient-facing apps. Delivered by Cogniss, the Health Innovation Network (HIN), AWS and SomX, the initiative saw over 70 applicants with solutions across an impressive show of women’s health solutions, whittled down to just five who pitched live to a panel of expert judges. After fierce deliberation, two were announced as winners:
NVP Minds - supporting women suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), a debilitating condition that causes severe nausea and vomiting in over 30,000 pregnancies in the UK every year.
HearHer - providing maternal mental wellbeing for the over 2 million mothers in the UK who support children with mental health or developmental challenges.
News Bites 🥪
💔 The Lonely Hearts LLM Club: The BMJ is sounding the alarm on a new “loneliness epidemic,” leading millions to turn to AI chatbots for emotional support. While we get the argument that AI can offer immediate relief as a sounding board, they risk creating ‘parasocial situations’ that replace real human connection with a digital echo chamber. Clinicians are now being urged to look for red flags (like patients referring to their AI as a “friend”) before the “dark compass” of isolation takes over. Very ‘Black Mirror’ which, famously, always ends well.
🤖 Agentic AI Keeping The Robots in Line: As AI moves from “chatting” to “doing” (some great commentary doing the rounds how LLMs really aren’t trying to impress you with chat anymore - their purpose is agentic and they’re being built very intentionally for that) a new initiative called TrustX has launched to make sure these autonomous systems don’t go rogue in the NHS with the unhappy AI triad: bias, errors and misinformation. Good to know someone’s actually checking receipts.
🌍 A New Special Relationship? UK and Singapore Team Up: Avengers, Assemble… Sort of. The UK is teaming up with Singapore so builders of healthtech can deal with both regulators simultaneously, and, wait for it, they’re calling it the ‘regulatory innovation corridor.’ Honestly, who names these things? Pigeon likes a corridor as much as the next guy, but they’re rarely that inspiring. Hospital corridors? They’re awful. The corridors of power, the corridor of uncertainty… not hard to be a top 3 corridor if it does work. Could easily become our favourite corridor.
💉 AI Tool Spares Cancer Patients Unnecessary Chemo: Norwegian startup, DoMore Diagnostics, is moving us to a future where patients can safely skip “unnecessary” chemotherapy treatment without compromising survival outcomes (possibly one of the best-use examples we can think of when it comes to predictive modelling in healthcare). How does it work? Well, as Andreas Kleppe, a research director at Oslo University Hospital Research, puts it, “We don't really know what the AI is looking for.” A gloriously honest reminder that we have absolutely no idea how AI works most of the time. But they’ve correlated outcomes, and it works.
🌟 Two UK hospitals Announce Real-time Data Access Partnership to Support Patients and Care Teams: UK healthtech startup, Sanome, is taking its Class IIb CE-marked, infection-detection platform, MEMORI, into the real world, rolling out at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust. It’s believed to predict hospital-acquired infections up to three days earlier than standard practice in some cases. With HAIs costing the NHS £2.7bn per year, there’s probably a fair few eyes on this rollout. We also support Sanome at SomX, so let us know if you want an intro.
👶 The WHO Puts Infertility on the Global Map: In a (very welcome) landmark move, the WHO has made moves to make fertility care safer, fairer and more affordable for all. The first-ever global guideline for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infertility labels it a “major public health” and equity issue, and is a call to arms for governments to stop treating fertility care as an optional luxury. This puts the ball in each country’s court to now adopt, adapt or update their national clinical guidelines.
🤝 NHS and Limbic Partner to Solve the Mental Health AI Problem: The NHS Confederation has partnered with Limbic (teacher’s pet here at Pigeon, if you’re up to date with recent issues) to investigate how AI triage tools can be scaled across the health service to improve access to mental health treatment. Limbic’s already in over 30 NHS Talking Therapies services with a chatbot to help patients self-refer and provides clinicians with pre-screened data to accelerate the start of care. The idea is that the NHS can catch people before they reach a crisis point and get patients to the right human help faster. And see below, because if that perked you up, they’re hiring.
If you’re not paywalled, check this out… (if you are, just read the summary for your weekly dose of ‘wtf’)…
🕵️ AI Ethics “Fake Citations” Fraud, By The Very People Who Argue Against It: Springer Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, is under fire after a book on AI ethics was discovered to contain dozens of questionable citations, including references to research journals that do not even exist. The “hallucinated” data in a guide meant to define ethical standards is a massive egg-on-face moment for the old-skool publishing industry, which simply cannot keep up with cartoon birds releasing satirical Substack newsletters.
… and finally… quite possibly the best news of 2025…
🐦 Pigeons Have a Better GPS Than Your iPhone: In a win for Pigeon’s everywhere, scientists have finally figured out that we are mega-geniuses and sense the Earth’s magnetic field through our inner ears using electromagnetic induction - basically, the same tech as a wireless phone charger. Turns out we have a “dark compass” that works in, you guessed it, total darkness, proving, once and for all, that pigeons are the ultimate healthtech innovators.
What to Listen to 🔊
If ‘wearable biosensors’ are your thing - why wouldn’t they be - learn from someone who’s been doing it for 7 years, raised big and is going to market with some seriously futuristic tech ☝🏼 I’ve also got Hjalmar Nilsonne, CEO of Neko Health on the pod in January, so make sure you’re following - you do not want to miss that one.
Events 📅
Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re ‘circling back in January’ at this point. Anything we put here will be ignored. First edition back in the new year, we’ll let you know what’s coming up. The SomX Events Roundup is also a good one if you prefer a single email with all the events for the month (for easy calendar admin).
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🧭 Harley Street Healthtech Pioneer Award 2026 Want to accelerate your growth, expand your network, and gain unparalleled visibility across the healthtech landscape? If you’re an early-stage UK and European healthtech company with proven impact and are ready to take the next step in your scaling journey, you could be in with a chance of winning an entire ecosystem support package. Applications close on Monday 19th January 2026, and the winner will be announced in February.
🤵🏾♂️ Staff Product Manager at MANUAL: Manual/Voy are growing at *pace* and here’s another snazzy role from them that will involve identifying, shaping, and launching entirely new product opportunities that unlock future growth for the business, working at the intersection of healthcare innovation, patient needs, market trends, and technology.
🔴 Technical Operations at Scarlet: Scarlet is doing great things in regulatory assessment in healthcare, and this role joins part of their Technical Operations: You’d be working across regulatory, technical, and operational domains to help design, run, and optimise the processes that allow Scarlet to operate as a notified body under the EU MDR and beyond.
🤝 Project Coordinator at Avalere Health: Another one for you project-focused lot: The Medical Project Coordinator plays a vital role in providing task-based support on essential project management activities for growing startup Avalere: Whilst primarily internally focused, you’ll also be maintaining regular communication with external stakeholders to keep them informed and updated on project progress.
🧠 Clinical Safety Officer at Limbic: Fresh off their partnership with the NHS Confederation (see our stories above), Limbic is looking for a safety lead to keep their mental health AI ethically sound and clinically safe. It’s a high-stakes gig for someone who wants to build the safety frameworks that will define how the next generation of patients interacts with digital therapy.
Goodbye 2025
Hey everyone, James here. It’s been emotional. Hope you enjoyed reading Pigeon this year as much as we enjoyed writing it.
This one is the last edition of the year (sad face) - we’re taking 2 weeks off, and the next one will be in your inboxes on the 10th January.
I toyed with the idea of a Merry Christmas edition next week for the metrics, but in the grand scheme, who actually cares? Metrics are meaningless when I can look at my 1-year-old laughing on a sledge instead.
I’m heading to the mountains for Christmas, for what feels like a very well-earned break with the family. Including the dog for full chaos.
Hope you all have wonderful festive breaks, and we’ll catch up (via this ridiculous concept for a newsletter) in the New Year.
Pigeon out ✌🏼