#296: The Doctor Will NOT See You Now
The one-minute (ish) healthtech roundup, by SomX.
Hi friends, guess what? The Government has worked out that it can dodge "financial ruin" by hiring 380,000 fewer NHS staff and letting AI mop up the difference. Nice. Also, there's a blood test for Alzheimer's, a vaginal-health AI built on actual useful data, and a perinatal mental health pilot quietly demolishing NHS recovery benchmarks for the women the system usually fails. It’s all happening.
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This week’s is a deep dive into companies using AI in mental healthcare. Where the evidence actually is, what’s genuinely working in digital mental health, what the optimal tech stack looks like, where the AI hype is getting ahead of the regulation, and the questions clinicians and commissioners should be asking before any of this gets near a patient.
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News Bites 🥪
🤖 The NHS plans to replace 380,000 staff with AI. Doctors aren't thrilled: Doesn’t sound great, does it. This draft NHS workforce strategy (out next month) reportedly bins the 2023 plan to grow the workforce from 1.4m to 2.3m by the mid-2030s, on the grounds that the increase would "bankrupt the NHS and the country." The fix, I hear you ask? Well, 380,000 fewer staff than previously forecast, a 75% cut to the planned nursing expansion, and AI doing thing. The BMA's Dr Amit Kochhar called it "crushingly disappointing" and a "massive, dangerous gamble." Much less polite words are also available online. Betting your entire workforce strategy on flawlessly deployed AI, is, at the best of times, pretty ****ing optimistic, but when we know the NHS struggles to deploy an EPR reliably, massive argument to label this delusional at best and dangerous at worst.
💸 The NHS also just opened a £900m AI tab. A GP called it "free money for mega corporations": Funny timing that. The same week we hear of plans to cut the workforce, NHS Shared Business Services launches a £900m "Healthcare AI Solutions" framework, which is a national procurement route for AI diagnostics, predictive analytics, robotics and consultancy. GP, clinical safety officer and software engineer, Marcus Baw, calls it "free money for mega corporations at a time when medicine is rapidly becoming an economically unviable occupation," adding that NHS England are "out of control with their spending." Get off the fence, Marcus. The flip side is that it could spark an amazing startup ecosystem if spent properly.
💊 DeepMind's drug-discovery spin-out bags another $2.1bn: Isomorphic Labs, the AlphaFold-adjacent love child of DeepMind, has closed a $2.1bn (yep, that’s billion) Series B led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, CapitalG, Temasek, MGX and the UK Sovereign AI Fund all piling in. That's on top of the $600m they raised barely a year ago, so somebody clearly likes what they're seeing. The cash will scale up their IsoDDE drug design engine and push their internal pipeline towards the clinic. Existing partnerships with Novartis, J&J and Lilly are providing the pharma muscle. The pitch, broadly, is that they've cracked a "repeatable way to design new medicines," which is either the most exciting sentence in biotech right now, or the sort of thing you say when you've raised $2.7bn and haven't yet put a molecule into a human.
🧠 Roche gets the green light for a blood test that spots Alzheimer's early: The catchily named ‘Elecsys pTau217’ cleverly detects amyloid pathology associated with Alzheimer's via a simple blood test. The point being made loudly by Roche is that it’s a tool for both primary and secondary care, not just memory clinics, which is interesting because getting an Alzheimer's diagnosis right now means a long, miserable trek through specialist appointments, PET scans, and lumbar punctures. A rule-in/rule-out blood test triaged at GP level could meaningfully shorten that journey, which matters more than ever now that we have actual disease-modifying treatments to offer the people who turn out positive. The caveat is that indeterminate results still need follow-up and the FDA nod is still pending. Let’s call it a win though.
🧫 Evvy launches an AI vaginal-health advisor trained on 100,000+ microbiome tests: It’s called EvvyAI and it’s a conversational advisor trained on what it claims is the world’s largest vaginal microbiome dataset (over 100,000 tests) to give women personalised guidance on vaginal health, fertility and menopause, handing off to its human care team when a question needs a clinician. And this in in a world where leading AI models reportedly flunk around 60% of women’s health questions because they were trained on data under-representing women. Less “we slapped GPT on a symptom checker,” more “general models are demonstrably bad at female biology, so we built one on female-specific data.” Excellent.
🤰 A perinatal mental health pilot for Black and minoritised mums is smashing NHS recovery benchmarks: We’ve spoken about the statistics and the gaps a lot here in the last few weeks, so it’s a pleasure to now report something positive. A digital perinatal mental health pilot from Dr-Julian and The Essential Baby Company (a model called haPPIE SHE Cares) has delivered results that put national averages to shame. 90% completed therapy and 74% recovered (NHS benchmark around 52%). It was built around community trust, culturally aware support, and, where possible, matching women with therapists who shared their background or language. With Black and ethnically minoritised women historically lacking trust in these services, Pigeon would very much like to see this get the funding to scale so more women get the help they need, and deserve.
👩⚕️ Nurses are being left out of the AI conversation, says Elsevier: Anddd, back to the AI drama. Elsevier's Clinician of the Future 2026 report (2,757 clinicians across 118 countries) found 41% of nurses feel underrepresented both in AI use and in the organisational decisions about AI, even as 61% of clinicians say they're seeing more patients. File this one right next to the lead story. We're planning to lean on AI to do more with fewer staff, while the largest part of that workforce says nobody's asking them how, when or whether the AI should be deployed. You cannot automate your way out of a workforce crisis while ignoring the workforce, people!
A BRAND NEW newsletter - for clinicians, by clinicians 📚
Clinicians, are you looking for somewhere to shoot the shift? Yep, thought so, because working in clinical practice is a ‘unique’ experience and those that get it, get it. Introducing Shift Happens, the monthly newsletter for clinicians, by clinicians. Free, no fluff, plenty of memes and smattering of lessons that fellow clinicians have learned along the way. The second edition is a collab with You Okay, Doc, a mental health charity dedicated to supporting healthcare professionals, so expect an excellent blend of poignant and punny. You know what to do 👇
What to listen to 🔊
This week, I’m joined by Ranjan Singh who built HealthHero. It's now Europe's largest digital clinic, covering 35 million patients across four countries. He talks me through his acquisition-led playbook, and what an AI-first health system actually looks like when you're operating at this level. Given this week's "fewer staff, more AI" headlines, it's a useful look at someone doing the AI-at-scale thing in practice.
Over on Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch sits down with Dr Catherine Skellern, Dr Nancy Cibotti and Dean Mills on what AI documentation tools like Heidi actually do to daily clinical workflows.
Roswitha Verwer and Dr Muskaan Bhan of YON E Health on their device for measuring vaginal pH and basal body temperature at home, and what an under-served corner of women's health looks like when you actually build for it. The personal stories behind the product are worth the 40 minutes alone.
Regular listeners to The Healthtech Pigeon Podcast have had a running commentary on the status of both Jessica and Belle’s smear tests. Pleased to report one is complete and another is booked, and if you’ve been putting yours off, let the latest episode of Living Hellth from Jo Doyle, with Professor Adeola Olaitan, a gynaecological oncology surgeon with over 20 years of experience in the diagnosis and surgical treatment of cervical cancer, be another reminder to get it done STAT 🙏
Events 📅
🎤 OPUS x SomX: HealthTech Unfiltered
📅 Tuesday 26th May, 6pm
🇬🇧 OPUS House, London (55 Southwark St, London SE1 1RU)
SomX is teaming up with OPUS (the entrepreneur community) for an evening of two panels and zero corporate waffle. First the investors and operators on what’s actually getting funded and how to escape NHS pilot purgatory, then the founders building with AI, navigating regulation, and making impact land as a commercial argument. Patchwork co-founder Dr Jing Ouyang, Shamik and Katie Baker (Tandem) is the first panellist announcement. Food, drinks, and the top floor afterwards. I’m hosting. Come and say hi.
🌆 SXSW London 2026
📅 1–6 June 2026
🇬🇧 London
Music, film, tech, culture, and a notably healthier health-tech track than the Austin original tends to feature.
🏗️ Pathfinder Digital Transformation Summit
📅 2 June 2026
🇬🇧 88 Wood Street
London Pathfinder’s CIC summit pulling NHS digital leaders, vendors and policy folk together.
🇬🇧 London Tech Week 2026
📅 8–12 June 2026
🇬🇧 Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.
🤝 Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
📅 9June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
For the third year running, some of the biggest names in UK healthtech, from Coulter Partners to HSBC Innovation Banking, Google and Thena Capital, are bringing Super Connector back for THE networking event of London Tech Week. The guest list reads like a who’s who in health innovation, so if you’d like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.
🏛️ NHS Confed Expo 2026
📅 10–11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Manchester Central
The UK’s biggest health and care leadership conference. 6,800+ attendees, 680+ speakers, NHS Confederation and NHS England both presenting their hands. Free for NHS, local authority and wider public sector staff. Pigeon will be there. Given the Palantir storm and the resignation cycle, expect the corridors to be busier than the agenda.
🎈 Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
📅 11 June 2026
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
If you like cake, healthtech and also believe in unicorns, you should probably cancel any other plans for 11 June. Join the team to celebrate a whole year of Hale House, London’s home of healthtech, and to get in early on the HLTH Europe buzz for the following week, with a no-holds-barred fireside with one of the UK’s biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too… but you’d have to head over to Portland Place to find out.
🐣 Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
📅 Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
🇬🇧 Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale House’s community evening on what it actually takes to move healthtech from pilot to adoption. Going fast on tickets and free. The Hale House crowd is exactly who you want to spend an evening with if you’re building anything that has to land inside the NHS.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.
Jobs for humans 🕵️♀️
🩺 Group Chief Medical Information Officer at University Hospitals of Leicester & Northamptonshire: Given this week’s “AI will save us” energy, here’s the role that actually decides whether digital lands safely. The GCMIO is the most senior clinical leader across a multi-trust NHS Group, accountable for digital clinical safety, governance, and leading EPR design, procurement and optimisation. They want a credible senior NHS clinician with full GMC registration who can lead digital transformation at scale, positioning clinicians as co-designers of digital change, not passive users. If you’ve ever muttered, “This would work if a clinician were in the room when they bought it” this is that room.
✍🏼 Clinical Engineer at Anima: Anima's hunting for a medic who can genuinely code. You'd use your medical training to solve novel technical problems on their personalised-medicine platform: owning projects end to end, working across TS/JS with React, Node and Angular. Sounds like the role for you? Apply today
🫁 Clinical Research Scientist at TidalSense : TidalSense wants a clinician with strong research and scientific-writing skills to drive clinical evidence generation and regulatory support for its AI-driven respiratory diagnostics as it scales from startup to global.
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Healthtech Pigeon is produced by SomX - the media-led communications and creative agency for healthcare. We help healthtech, biotech, pharma and public sector organisations tell sharper stories through strategy, PR, content, design, events and media production. Built by clinicians, scientists and creatives who know the space. Work with us.
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