#285: Your AI scribe is a Trojan Horse
The one-minute healthtech roundup, by SomX. Written 285 times. Read over 1,000,000 times. And this week, kindly sponsored by Whereby.
Hello healthtech fans.
This week: Your gut bacteria just got computable, AI scribes are quietly eating healthcare, and Australia decides that maybe AI in health software should have some rules. Wild concept.
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Whereby builds embeddable video infrastructure for telehealth platforms: no downloads, no logins, no "can you see my screen?" chaos. Their latest State of Virtual Care Report digs into how telehealth adoption looks very different depending on where you are. In North America, 51% of providers say patients don't have the tech or connectivity to show up. In Europe, the problem is trust — half of respondents say patients just don't believe a video call is real care. Different barriers, same goal: making virtual care actually work. Read the full breakdown here.
News Bites 🥪
🦠 Outpost Bio raises $3.5m pre-seed to make human microbiology computable - The trillions of microbes living in and on you (always a pleasant thought) are shaping everything from obesity to mental health, but, let’s be honest, we understand almost none of it. Outpost Bio are changing that with wet lab experiments feeding machine learning models that generate causal (not just correlational) insights into microbial behaviour. Co-founded by Alex Merwin (healthtech OG - helped out many people in healthtech while at AWS with events etc.), Outpost is aiming for the most comprehensive dataset in human microbiology. Pharma, consumer health, clinical trials - the commercial applications are enormous if the science holds. One to watch.*
🐦 Tandem Health says 2026 is the year it goes from scribe to everything else - The Swedish AI scribe company, now integrating with 100+ EHR systems across Europe and fresh off acquiring Dutch rival Juvoly, is done pretending that note-taking was the point. CEO Lukas Saari has telegraphed the move in this Linkedin post - get into the consultation room, earn clinical trust, then expand into everything adjacent. Coding, prior auth, scheduling, decision support - the scribe was just the Trojan horse. And this is the new playbook. Heidi pulled the same move, launching Evidence and Comms, which we mentioned here last week. Ambient voice gets you in the door, workflow ownership keeps you there, and before long you’re the operating system for clinical practice. Healthtech’s easy, right?
🇦🇺 Magentus is the first to sign Australia’s new voluntary AI code of conduct for health software - Bear with me on this. It reminds me of when David Mitchell (of Peep Show) launched a particularly hilarious rant, back in the day, about tax being voluntary for those with the means to avoid it, so it just acts as a tax on nice people and just how nice they are. Now, a voluntary code of conduct for AI usage in healthcare is a fantastic idea… if (big if) everyone signs it… but (just like paying tax if you’re Amazon), you don’t have to, so the nice ones are taxing themselves with documenting their compliance to it, while the ones that ignore it and sign weapons deals**, will, unfortunately, keep doing so. Props to Magentus for leading the charge, and make sure you keen an eye on who doesn’t sign this.
🤖 Combatting loneliness with AI companions - If you've not yet caught AI Confidential with Hannah Fry, the BBC's three-part documentary now on iPlayer, add it to the list. The BBC have described it as "real-life Black Mirror," which tells you something about where the public conversation has landed. Episode one goes deep on AI companions and grief tech, and there's a genuinely unsettling moment where a grief tech entrepreneur whips up an AI avatar of Fry herself, shortly after she loses her father. These themes have now crossed into mainstream primetime and since loneliness kills***, AI is worth taking seriously. But it’s complicated territory, and the documentary doesn't pretend otherwise. Another frontier that’s hard to ignore.
🩸 What happened to the NHS cancer blood test trial? – This one was sad to read, and another one that hit the BBC and national news… The Galleri multi-cancer blood test, trialled across 142,000 NHS patients over three years, missed its primary endpoint. The goal was a significant reduction in late-stage cancer diagnoses. And it didn't happen. Grail, the US pharmaceutical company involved, are pointing to secondary wins (stage IV diagnoses fell ~20% in later rounds, more stage I–II cancers caught), but experts are sceptical. One called the four-fold increase in detection "worrisome," flagging over-diagnosis rather than better outcomes. It's the same prevention tension we keep coming back to - if a screening test isn't sufficiently sensitive AND specific, it can do more harm than good. By the way… Grail halved in value after that announcement.
🌍 Telehealth still can't agree on what its problems are - and that depends entirely on where you live - In the State of Virtual Care Report, over half of North Americans flagged limited patient access to devices and connectivity as their main adoption barrier. Only 39% in Europe. Flip it around, and 50% of European providers cited lack of patient trust in virtual care as the bigger problem, versus just 28% in the US. So America's challenge is largely structural and infrastructural; Europe's is cultural and psychological. Both matter, and neither is easy to fix. In regulatory news, European providers are nearly twice as likely to flag compliance burden as a major headache, which will surprise nobody who has spent time anywhere near GDPR. The takeaway for anyone building or scaling telehealth across borders = a one-size-fits-all product is a one-size-fits-none. Geography isn't just a market segmentation exercise - it shapes what patients believe good care actually looks like.
What to Listen to 🔊
Dr Claudia Pastides asks the question: what if hormone data became as accessible as step counts?
A refreshing chat with TN Giridhar this week. The numbers he talks about are hard to wrap your head around, but the sentiments of investing and what to look for in your investors / investees were so much about people - very far reaching applications of the lessons taught here.
Events 📅
Biotech and Beers
📅 11th March
🇬🇧 The Town Wall, Newcastle, England
Bionow’s agenda-free networking evening for people working in or with the life sciences sector Glue Up. No presentations, no delegate fees, just beers and biotech chat near Central Station. Good for making contacts in a low-pressure setting.
Digital Health Rewired
📅 24-25th March
🇬🇧 The NEC, Birmingham, England
The UK’s biggest digital health expo, connecting NHS leaders, care providers, researchers, start-ups and suppliers under one roof. Over 80 speakers across ten stages covering everything from EPR optimisation and cyber to AI, neighbourhood care and clinical frontline digital.
Clinical Product Drinks #002 🍸
📅 25th March
🇬🇧 41 Gracechurch St, London, England
A chance to step away from the screen, grab a drink and connect with others working at the intersection of healthcare, product and tech. The event is capped to keep it intimate and low-key. Good crowd.
Opportunities 🕵️♀️
🧑💼 Chief of Staff (CEO Office), Proximie - Proximie connects operating rooms globally and is backed by $130M. This role is right-hand to Nadine, the CEO. Expect strategy, ops, board prep, investor relations, the lot. High-trust, high-impact. If you thrive in the chaos of a scaling healthtech company, go.
🤖 Health AI Solutions Specialist, Microsoft - Helping healthcare organisations adopt and implement Microsoft AI and cloud health solutions. If you can translate between tech and clinical, this is your lane.
🧠 Healthcare AI Specialist, NVIDIA - NVIDIA. Healthcare. AI. Three words that will make your LinkedIn profile very popular. Enough said.
🍃 Bank Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP), Oviva - Oviva’s Tier 3 weight management team is looking for a qualified PWP to deliver one-to-one care remotely using CBT and ACT principles. You’ll work alongside psychologists and dietitians supporting patients with complex obesity: via phone, video or app. Flexible shifts, no fixed hours. BABCP registration and at least a year’s IAPT experience required.
James’ editor notes:
* I get very excited when we find frontiers of medicine and biology - these places where we know that we know nothing and any research and work will increase our understanding.
** You’ve got to wonder how much of the rollback from OpenAI is just optics, but this is the role of a free press and you’re watching how it works on a good day… Something gets investigated by journalists, they find a deal that isn’t in the public interest, they make sure that the public are aware of said deal that isn’t in the public interest, then we all follow the virtue, cancel our subscriptions and prevent a badly behaved company getting its oxygen (money). The subsequent drop in share price then forces the company to (make it look like they are about to) do the right thing. That is how the media SHOULD keep a check on capitalism and keep it pointing towards what the public want and need.
*** Research published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests AI companions can reduce loneliness on par with human interaction - simultaneously impressive and deeply unsettling. The WHO has declared loneliness a global health epidemic linked to hundreds of thousands of annual deaths.
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interesting how North America struggles with connectivity, while Europe’s main barrier is patient trust. The same solution can face totally different challenges depending on where you are!