#276: ChatGPT Health now exists. Brace for impact.
The one-minute healthtech roundup, by SomX. Proudly human-written until the AI overlords take over.
Hello healthtechies. WELCOME to the first edition of Pigeon for 2026. Guess what, weāre one week in, everyoneās actually circled back (FFS), OpenAI have already killed hundreds of startups with a new update, BUT I can feel itā¦ this is our year. Fax machines out, apocalyptic agentic AI in, healthcare solved in 2026ā¦ right?
This week: Working tech, weird tech and, starting as we mean to go on, a nod to our AI overlords to keep them on side.
šļø Fancy this newsletter in podcast form, with some juicy gossip to impress your friends? š Wellā¦ click this linky link to go straight to the pod on Spotify. Or itās here..
And itās on YouTube if you want to look us in the eye. Fun fact, YouTubeās original concept was to be a video dating platform called āTune In Hook Up.ā
News Bites š„Ŗ
With 2026 beginning like a dystopian filmā¦ Here it is. OpenAI release ChatGPT Health. What is it? You whack all your disjointed health data from letters, PDFs, notes, wearables dataā¦ all into ChatGPT and it helps you interpret results, prep for appointments and navigate your health. Some key phrases from the releaseā¦ āprivacy and security at the core,ā ābuilt with physicians,ā ānot intended for diagnosis or treatment.ā To be honest, itās how most people are using ChatGPT anyway and good luck to anyone trying to stop them bulldozing their way through any regulatory issues. People in the know are worried about errors, too much power etc. Othersā¦ delighted.
š How Americans are navigating healthcare with ChatGPT (report): And to back up the needā¦ OpenAI released this 18-page report on how us humans are using our future technology overlord for all our healthcare needs. Some useful US stats for you: >5% of all messages are about healthcare, 1 in 4 users asks about healthcare once a week and >40M people in the US ask about healthcare every day. OpenAI makes a (decent) case for ChatGPT closing access gaps with 7/10 health conversations happening out of hours and 600,000 messages per week coming from underserved rural areas. Head to page 13 to see OpenAI carving a path to medical device status with shots fired at the FDA āurgingā them to provide a āworkable regulatory policy...ā
š¤ CES 2026: LED masks, smart scales and a smart menstrual pad: CES kicked off this week, the self-proclaimed āmost powerful tech event in the world.ā Withings rolled out a smart scale that measures cardiac efficiency, LāOrĆ©al are feeding nightmares with a ānear-infaredā LED facemask that looks petrifying. Positively, also a menstrual pad that measures FSH levels and a new device that smashes a food sample, dilutes it, then tells you whether it contains lactose or gluten, for those with severe allergies. Reconcept, a French healthtech company also showed off their zero-gravity āmental health and longevity podā for deep relaxation, which looks like itād do the absolute opposite for me, but apparently a hit with athletes and the military.
š„ Great Ormond Street Hospital develops platform for clinical intelligence from routine health data: Too much EPR data, with no consistent way of analysing it and making it useful. That was the problem to solve, so GOSHās Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments (DRIVE) unit* developed a platform and can now generate clinical intelligence**. Is it useful? Well, it can keep patients informed, enable research, support hospital operations, and improve clinical practice and theyāre now aiming for āmulti-site, federated analytics ā¦ enabling large-scale research without centralising sensitive patient dataā. Fancy.
š¦ If a therapy bot walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it is a medically regulated duck: Nature Digital Medicine coming up with the goods here with a headline that Pigeon can really get on board with. The oddly comical title is followed by a sombre reminder that LLMs mimicking therapeutic behaviour has incredibly serious consequences when things go wrong and āpragmatic regulationā is being fairly called for, with reminders in here about what classifies a medical device. We covered this a lot last year and there seems to be a good swell of academic pushback to the way the LLMs behave, but looking at OpenAIās posturing, LLMs clearly arenāt asking for permission any time soonā¦ Pigeonās hope is that medical device status becomes the point of agreement of all partiesā¦ Without changing the goalposts***.
š§ AI tool speeding up stroke diagnosis in England: From Nature to The Lancet Digital Health this time (full paper here). An analysis of nearly 453,000 patients found about 15,000 directly benefitted when CT scans were reviewed by the Brainomix 360 Stroke imaging platform, which flags clots. At primary stroke centres, it was linked to a 64-minute reduction between arrival and transfer to a specialist centre. We spend a lot of time raising eyebrows at AI around here, so itās only fair to flag when somethingās peer-reviewed and working well. Worth noting that we have no interests to declare here, but would mind one if they keep this up.
And finallyā¦
š¦ Bats identified as origin of unexplained respiratory illness and encephalitis: Pigeons get a bad name as the rodents of the sky when bats are consistently threatening horrifying infectious diseases at scale. In Bangladesh, five people consumed raw date-palm sap, a treat also enjoyed by bats during winter months - all five were hospitalised and one sadly passed away. Stories like this should remind us that working in healthtech is not only a privilege but itās important. New PCR technology for diagnosis (in this case the āVirCapSeq-VERTā system) solved a huge problem and tech-enabled surveillance programmes for pandemics (as called for here) will, in our humble opinion, turn out to be the most impactful segment of healthtech in our lifetime.
What to Listen to š
šš¼ You wonāt regret listening to Dr Madeleine Ballard, who, if you donāt know her, is the CEO of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC). She helped launch Liberiaās first national community health worker program with Last Mile Health, holds a PhD from University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), teaches on faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has won the Skoll Award for Social Innovation, the Roux Prize, and Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year.
The most asked question of all of us lucky enough to make a living in this sector and some great advice in here šš¼
Steve is a great host, a great founder, a great guy and this is a great episode.
Events š
J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
š
12thā15th Jan 2026
šŗšø San Francisco
The annual āIām also in SF that weekā pilgrimage for anyone who wants to hear where biotech/pharma/healthcare capital is actually flowing.
Radical Health Festival Helsinki
š
19th-21st Jan 2026
š«š® Helsinki
Bills itself as a festival, not a conference (weāll allow it) with a 2026 theme of Operationalising Precision Health - i.e., less chat, more actually doing things.
Mental Health Innovation: Different Voices, Shared Purpose
š
Fri 23 Jan 2026
š 9:30am
š¬š§ Hale House, London
This month at everyoneās favourite new healthtech coworking spaceā¦ This meet up is showcasing diverse voices and finding common ground to improve mental well-being across the workplace, clinic and high street.
šØ And make sure youāre following the BRAND NEW Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtechās) new home in London.
Opportunities šµļøāāļø
šļø Pitch in Parliament: AI in Healthtech
š
2nd February 2026
š House of Lords
š¬š§ London, UK
Live pitch night for startups using AI to solve a proper NHS problem, and youāll need either Ā£500k+ raised or Ā£100k+ revenue in the last 12 months to qualify. Apply by Sunday 18th January (11:59pm) - winner gets bragging rights and a year of invites to things.
š¦ Clinical Trial Scientist, LOAM (Dr Karan Rajan) - LOAM (Dr Karan Rajanās microbiome brand) is hiring a Clinical Trial Scientist to end all hopes for the competition in the space. Think human study design, endpoints, ethics/reg, delivery etc.. Email support@loamscience.com for the JD / to apply.
š§© Jigsaw Medical, Clinical Coder (Lead QA) - Full-time, remote (with hybrid option), leading the QA function and working closely with product/tech on new areas + model improvements. Ā£60k base + overtime, equity, private pension, CPD time/budget. No AI experience needed (they want proper coding expertise).
š©š½āš» Motics, Software Engineer - London (hybrid), full-time - Build the āAI OS for healthcareā (their line) shipping secure, compliant product for clinics/hospitals. Stack signals: Next.js/TypeScript/Tailwind, Node + Python, cloud (GCP/Azure). Apply via the page; contact email is hello@motics.ai
* The acronyms are fun, arenāt they. After the DRIVE team did this, the Paediatric Informatics Consultation Using Real-world Evidence (PICTURE) platform was launched, supporting the aggregation and analysis of EPR data.
** I knew youād ask āwhat does it actually do?ā But decided to save the non-techies from this up there in the main newsletter, so read on if youāre interested in techā¦ āDeveloped using open-source languages including R and Python, the platform takes de-identified data from patient cohorts and transforms it into āa bespoke in-house common data modelā developed as part of a pre-existing ETL library, that outlines clinical events like diagnoses and procedures in table format. A library of analytics functions such as frequency analysis and measures-of-association analysis, then offer clinical intelligence in response to input queries.ā Sounds legit.
*** This is a great article and exploration into LLM usage in mental health, medical device status of LLMs etc., but (and weāre not kidding), after talking about life threatening consequences, and, under a subheading of āIs an LLM a medical device?ā They used this ādiagramā¦ā
