#297: Sorry, the NHSE you have dialled is no longer in service
The one-minute (ish) healthtech roundup, by SomX.
Hi friends, big week for ‘roided up superhumans at the Enhanced Games in Vegas, Apple’s the next company that now wants data from your wrist, but hey, good news - a couple of startups actually raised money 💰
News Bites 🥪
🏛️ The NHS Modernisation Bill = NHS England is on its way out: Another restructure. Excellent. Before he sacked himself, Wes put in a bill that kicked off with abolishing NHS England and folding it back into DHSC, then greenlit the long-promised Single Patient Record and abolished Healthwatch (FYI, whose tagline is “we make sure NHS and social care decision-makers hear your voice and use your feedback to improve care”). I mention it because the 2nd reading is tomorrow (Monday 1 June). If you enjoy watching as your NHSE contract gets lit on fire, or want to be the first to run the transcript through Claude to get a Linkedin post on it for those life-changing likes from strangers, go to parliament.tv at 3pm.
🏃 The Enhanced Games are real, and they’re equal parts entertaining and concerning: Weird one, this. Chatted about it on this week’s Pigeon podcast with Dr Tomasz George, who has a PhD in longevity. Athletes openly using performance-enhancing drugs, compete, and it’s broadcast as entertainment. The cynical might call it a modern colosseum as 2026 ‘gladiators' fight their own insecurities to death. The credulous might draw a line from athletes’ learning whilst optimising human performance.* A pre-event University of Birmingham study found 91% of competitors had used testosterone, 79% HGH, 62% stimulants, which isn’t exactly bleeding edge longevity science, but they are enhancements. Look, it’s adjacent to healthtech (longevity bros, biohacking, “performance optimisation” all share the same Venn diagram), and it’s a stress-test for what “consumer health” looks like when you remove the safety guardrails (kind of), but only 1 world record’s been broken at the time of writing so far, though, which is a bit disappointing / embarrassing.** Then again, do we really want someone jacked up so hard they break the sound barrier just to see how many years that took off their life?
🤖 1 in 7 Brits would rather ask ChatGPT than see a GP: The traction on this narrative keeps building. It deserves attention and we should take it to heart and build a system with it in mind. This time, a KCL/Focaldata poll of 2,083 adults found 15% have used an AI chatbot in place of a GP visit and 21% have decided against seeing a clinician based on chatbot advice. Lead author Prof Graham Lord isn’t celebrating. Remember, this is a poll, not a peer-reviewed paper, and we like our academic integrity here at Pigeon, so caveats do apply. But the direction of travel is obvious in that patients are already triaging themselves with LLMs, while the regulatory and clinical-safety frameworks are still on chapter one of the user manual. The NHS App’s AI features can’t ship fast enough.
👂 TympaHealth grabs £2m to keep peering into ears: Fellow Mauritian, Dr Krishan Ramdoo’s hearing-health platform has secured a £2m Innovate UK loan to scale Tympa Assist, the AI otoscopy tool used across the world. I first met Krish a long time ago, and even since then it’s been clear that Tympa is one of the genuinely useful “tech-enabled task-shifting” stories, moving ear care out of overstretched ENT clinics and into pharmacies and primary care. Frankly, I have a soft spot for those fixing a workflow problem rather than promising to reinvent medicine via API. Worth watching whether Innovate UK loans (vs equity) become a more common funding route for clinically-validated UK healthtech. We’re in dire need of a model between ‘spend your own money’ and ‘here, take this briefcase, but make sure you become the biggest company on earth or else 🫵🏼.’***
🩸 The $20m preventative health app setting a new European standard: Paris-based, Lucis, has raised a $20m Series A (led by Singular, with General Catalyst and Y-Combinator along for the ride), just four months after an $8m seed. They look at 110+ of your blood biomarkers, have an AI companion app, built in physician oversight, and claim a mission to make prevention "the default, rather than a privilege." The early data’s interesting, 99.9% of users had at least one biomarker outside optimal ranges, and 75% of six-month returners improved at least three markers without medication. At £399/yr, realistically, we have a long way to go before prevention is for the unprivileged (see part 1 and part 2 of my prevention deep dive for Pigeon Insider). But, with the likes of Lucis, Neko and others competing in this area, tech will advance, prices should come down and access should go up. The tipping point will be longitudinal data pointing to economic payback for one of these services at national scale, then real questions start emerging…
🩻 NHS SBS launches a £900m AI procurement framework: Not the Special Boat Service unfortunately (the NHS would be infinitely cooler, and you’d probably assume infinitely more effective, with an armed special forces unit persuading people to increase their tech adoption), alas, no, this is the Shared Business Services. Anyway, the new Healthcare AI Solutions framework is the biggest single AI procurement vehicle the NHS has put on the table. Critics say the structure and supplier qualification thresholds favour incumbents over the startups (try to look surprised). Good thing? Bad thing? Either way, if you’re a clinical AI vendor with UK ambitions, take a read.
And finally…
🍎 Apple Watch might be about to get a proper FDA-cleared BP feature: Given big tech’s obsession with getting our bodily data, it’s no surprise that Apple are reportedly submitting a direct BP measurement capability for FDA review, with the Watch Ultra 4 the leading candidate. I worked in ITU, so my bar for BP accuracy is pretty high and I’ve seen plenty of startups trying this for years (the validation papers are very mixed). But if Apple actually clears the FDA bar on cuffless BP at scale, you might say that’s a meaningful shift in the home-monitoring landscape and it might be a problem for every standalone BP device company. Distribution is most of the game these days in that weird grey area of B2C health/wellness/wearables/longevity stuff. Would be a win for patients in the community though, where accurate, more continuous BP readings provide insights that genuinely keep them healthier.
Good news (literally). Pigeon Insider has launched.
Pigeon Insider is the long-form upgrade to this lovely newsletter. It’s your way of supporting this one whilst getting some superb (if we do say so) deep research, analysis and views.
The latest edition has everything you need to know about clinically safe and valid mental health AI - the history, the technical architecture, what happens when it goes wrong and, actually, why my thoughts around them were completely wrong.
It was released on Thursday. The back catalogue is available once you sign up.
If you want to sound smart at your next board meeting, investor committee or family gathering… subscribe below. You’ll make the fee back via your inevitable, immediate promotion and pay rise.
What to listen to 🔊
This week I'm joined by Dr Sujitha Selvarajah, co-founder of Hesta Health, who closed a £2M pre-seed round to rebuild postnatal care from the ground up. We get into why most of the women's health gap has nothing to do with reproductive health, why new mothers are abandoned at the moment their care needs spike, and what it actually takes to build healthcare that's both clinically excellent and humane.
Host Jordan Sollof is joined by Alcidion's UK MD/CMO Paul Deffley and CCIO Tracy McClelland to dig into patient flow and why it's the unglamorous bit of NHS operations that quietly determines whether everything else works. They walk through a live example fand unpack the key findings of the Public Policy Projects report on bed management and flow.
Clinical AI only helps patients if clinicians and health systems trust it. Seth Hain, Epic's Senior VP of R&D, makes the case for building foundation models that respect institutional autonomy, minimise burden, and prioritise safety.
Events 📅
🌆 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.
🌍 Global Ambitions Forum: ABHI International at Hale House
📅 3 June, 12:00-17:00
🇬🇧 Hale House, London
ABHI’s Middle East and US Accelerator alumni in one room with the wider UK health innovation ecosystem: Suzie Ali-Hassan, Stephen Williams (Intersurgical), Nick De-Pennington (Ufonia), David Porter (Apposite Capital). If you’re thinking about international expansion and want practical operating guidance rather than another panel about “global ambition,” this is the one.
🇬🇧 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
📅 9 June 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🕵️♀️
🧬 Clinical Director, Metabolic Health, Ōura (hybrid, London). The $11bn smart ring people want an endocrinology/metabolic-medicine clinician with SaMD experience to own the medical strategy as they push deeper into chronic disease. Genuinely rare role: clinical depth plus consumer hardware reach.
🧠 Senior Product Manager, Limbic (London). Limbic now reaches 15%+ of NHS talking-therapies providers, and they’re hiring a PM to own the next phase of the clinical assistant. If you want to ship product into the NHS at actual scale, this is one of the few places doing it.
🩺 Clinical Lead (GP), Accurx (London). Pigeon has lost count of how many GP practices use Accurx. They’re after a practising GP to keep the clinical thinking close to the product. Two days a week clinical, three days shaping the tool you probably already use.
💻 Senior Software Engineer (Frontend), Neko Health (London). Daniel Ek’s preventative scanning empire is hiring across the engineering org as they scale their London and Manchester clinics. React/TypeScript stack, doctor-facing and member-facing apps. If your LinkedIn feed has been increasingly Neko-shaped lately, this is why.
🧪 Multiple roles, Lindus Health (London Bridge). The “anti-CRO” raised a $55m Series B and is hiring across commercial, clinical operations, product and engineering. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at how clinical trials are run and thought “surely this can be better,” they agree.
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See you next week, Pigeon fans ✌🏼
* I’m on fire with the vocabulary today
** Even that was down to the banned-at-regular-events-swimming-suit which gives you an extreme hydrodynamic edge.
*** Not the best description of venture capital, but you get the point
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