#278: An Epic Gorilla Law Suit
The one-minute (ish) healthtech roundup, by SomX and kindly sponsored by Whereby.
Hello healthtech fans.
This week: Get drunk without drinking, Gorilla gets sued and Claude for Healthcare gives ChatGPT Health a run for it’s money.
🎙️ 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. Or just click the player below. Jessica from SomX is joined by Andreas Bovens and Calvin Bowen from Whereby to discuss the evolving landscape of telehealth:
And it’s on YouTube if you want to look at humans.
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 🥪
🤖 Claude for Healthcare: The 'We're Not ChatGPT Health' Pitch: Another day, another LLM moves into healthcare. Is it exactly the same as ChatGPT Health? Actually no. This one’s positioning itself as the “enterprise-grade, safety-first” option for health systems, so taking care of all the stuff needed by providers, payers etc... What does that mean? They say they’ve built connectors to CMS coverage databases, ICD-10, PubMed, and the National Provider Identifier Registry, plus partnerships with AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Banner Health, and Microsoft. Ok, interesting. And this quote was fun… “We’re not trying to replace doctors, we’re trying to give them back 2 hours a day.” The most common phrase you’ll find in the valley of (startup) death. Also, so we’ve mentioned it, OpenAI just acquired an EPR…
🏥 NHS Wants Healthcare ‘As Easy as Ordering a Cab’ (Bold Strategy): Does Wes Streeting know if he’d just said ‘Uber for healthcare,’ he’d automatically get a bank error in his favour and a cushy advisor opportunity in his inbox*? Anyway, this is about the new NHS Online Hospital starting in 2027. How will it work? Choose it and you can be seen ASAP by the next available clinician in the country. You’re triaged through the app, connected to specialists via video, and get monitoring from home, so tests and procedures still happen at local sites. In this press release they’ve described it as easy as getting a cab, a takeaway and online banking, all of which my parents find impossible, so should be interesting.
⚖️ Epic Sues Health Gorilla Over 300K Patient Record Fraud Scheme: Well well well, Epic and four health systems say Health Gorilla (tech company that helps you exchange sensitive patient data) let “fake providers” (shell companies pretending to be providers) pull ~300,000 patient records, then allegedly funnel/sell the data to law firms looking to put class-action law suits together**. Apparently Health Gorilla also stuffed “junk” activity into records to fake certain clinical activity and, when caught, just spun up new entities (“Hydra” vibes if you’re into your Greek mythology). Health Gorilla says it’s just Epic squeezing their competition. Either we’ve got a serious interoperability trust-and-verification problem, or Epic being Epic. Likely both?
🔥 Three Women's Health Investment Reports Drop in One Week (With Receipts): Three separate women's health investment analyses dropped within days of each other, and the numbers are making VCs rethink their maths. AOA Dx's "Follow the Exits" showed diagnostics delivered 12-17x median returns and dominated billion-dollar exits. WHAM's report found that investing $350M in women-focused research generates $14B in economic returns, citing 50 exits since 2018 (14 in 2024 alone). Kearney’s punchline was women’s health VC has tripled since 2019, but still represents only ~2.3% of total healthcare VC. So we've got: massive exits, 12-17x returns, $14B ROI on $350M investment, and VCs are still allocating 2.3%. Make it make sense.
And finally…
🍺 Scientists Finally Explain Why Some People Get Drunk Without Drinking: Finally, vindication for everyone who’s ever said “I swear I only had one drink” and meant it. Turns out there’s a specific gut bacteria and biological pathway behind auto-brewery syndrome - a rare condition where you produce alcohol from food, so you get wrecked without actually drinking. Full paper in Cell Metabolism if you want the long version, but TLDR: Researchers linked “auto-brewery” style intoxication (and fatty liver) to high-alcohol-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae - a common gut bug that, in some people, ferments carbs into enough ethanol to cause real problems.
🧑⚕️ Designing virtual care patients actually trust: In healthcare, trust gets built (or broken) in the detail. In this article, learn how every provider should set up the optimal telehealth consultation system: no logins/downloads, keep patients in a familiar branded flow (embed the call in your portal/app), a calm in-call UI, and very explicit cues when anything sensitive is happening (recording/transcription). Also: assume things will go wrong (bandwidth, devices, late arrivals) and design “graceful recovery” so clinicians don’t become IT support.
What to Listen to 🔊
👆🏼 James is joined by Jacob West (Microsoft UK Healthcare) to talk about everything Microsoft are up to (it’s a lot). Expect NHS Copilot rollout chat (big trial, big claims), Dragon Copilot turning clinic conversations into structured notes, and a deep dive on security.
🎙️ What actually happens when you leave people alone for too long? The loneliness epidemic unpacked, followed by an explainer on how isolation rewires the brain. Voluntary solitude = fine. Forced isolation = cognitive decline, chronic stress, and mental health fallout.
🎙️ NHS Workforce: Training Bottlenecks, Burnout, and the Reality on the Ground. Jessamy meets with Dr Mumtaz Patel, RCP President, to discuss the pressures facing resident doctors and why current UK training pathways aren’t delivering what the system needs. A candid look at what’s broken, what needs to change, and why retaining clinicians is harder than simply recruiting them. Turns out…doctors are not an infinitely renewable resource.
Events 📅
Radical Health Festival Helsinki
📅 19th-21st Jan 2026
🇫🇮 Helsinki
Bills itself as a festival, not a conference (we’ll 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
📅 Fri 23 Jan 2026
🕘 9:30 am
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
This month at London’s favourite new healthtech coworking space… This meet up is showcasing diverse voices and finding common ground to improve mental well-being across the workplace, clinic and high street.
The Festival of Genomics & Biodata, ExCeL London
📅 28th-29th Jan 2026
🇬🇧 ExCeL, London
Two days of genomics, biodata, and precision medicine, from sequencing and AI-driven discovery to what actually happens when you try to move this stuff out of the lab and into a health system.
🚨 Make sure you’re following the BRAND NEW Hale House Linkedin page to keep up with all the events coming up at our (healthtech’s) new home in London.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🏛️ Pitch in Parliament: AI in Healthtech
📅 2nd February 2026
📍 House of Lords
🇬🇧 London, UK
Live pitch night for startups using AI to solve a proper NHS problem, and you’ll need either £500k+ raised or £100k+ revenue in the last 12 months to qualify. Apply by TODAY - Sunday, 18th January (11:59 pm) - winner gets bragging rights and a year of invites to things.
🤖 Business Development Manager at Tortus: Tortus (the AI scribe that sped up NHS clinics by 60%) is hiring a BDM with ~3 years of experience to scale O.S.L.E.R. across hospitals and health systems. First NHS DTAC-compliant generative AI for clinicians. Backed by Khosla Ventures. And they’re hiring for marketing too.
🩺 Clinical Operations Associate at Hesta Health: GMC-registered F3+ doctor needed for clinical ops role - analysing postnatal patient data, producing wellbeing reports, and care coordination. Part-time/flexible, hybrid London Victoria, starts Feb 2026. Women’s health focus.
🧠 Clinical Project Manager at Prima Mente: Prima Mente (AI neuroscience lab building epigenetic foundation models to detect early neurological disease) is hiring a Clinical Project Manager to lead their 1,000-patient dementia study across 15 healthcare settings. Hannah was on The Healthtech Podcast recently if you want to swat up for the interview.
* For legal reasons, this is a joke. Then again, it happens, and quite a lot…
** If your US law’s rusty (and Suits didn’t make you fluent), here’s the gist: a class action is when lots of people who’ve been wronged in a similar way band together and sue as one group - same core issue, combined case, bigger leverage. So here, they’re allegedly being illegally found, grouped together and sent as a nice list to a law firm that can start a suit. I just got why it’s called Suits.