#298: Big Tech Meets Big Medicine.
The one-minute (ish) healthtech roundup, by SomX.
Hi friends, me again. Guess what? Another big week in healthtech. An online NHS Trust with a bloke from Tesco in charge, Microsoft and the Mayo did a thing, Korea and the US did a thing, and some founders just did a Series E and probably laughed as they spent the number in your pitch deck on lunch. (Thatâs a joke, theyâre probably very nice people with a fantastic legal team).
News Bites đ„Ș
đ± England's first new NHS trust in over a decade is, essentially, a website: What a start⊠the PM trailed it last September and weâre now official⊠the Online NHS Trust exists, with former Tesco and Apple retail boss John Browett in the chair. There are 8.5 million virtual appointments over three years for the likes of menopause, recurring UTIs and iron deficiency anaemia, all routed through the NHS App once your GP refers you. Sensible enough. On the board youâve also got Neko Health's Global Medical Director Nikki Kanani, plus an ex-LoveFilm and graze.com founder and a clutch of consumer-tech NEDs. Reads more Silicon Roundabout than Stevenage General, but hey, call me a sellout if you want, but we complain enough about stagnant thinking, bureaucracy, waiting times and all the rest of it⊠Some people with a north star pointing towards customer service might be absolutely ideal. Why not?
<Awaits multiple reasons in the comments, but Iâm here for it>
đ©ș 26 womenâs health technologies are now heading toward NHS pilots: The Ripple Womenâs Digital Health Challenge, delivered through Cogniss, the Health Innovation Network, and Amazon Web Services, used to support 2 innovations. Now itâs 26 and theyâre all patient-facing digital tools for underserved areas of womenâs health. Some epic companies in here like MenoSaathi (menopause support for South Asian women), Jalititi (multilingual breast health for Black women), and Gracefully (bereavement support for maternity staff). Several are now in pilot discussions with NHS orgs and they plan to create a womenâs health portfolio for NHS organisations to evaluate and procure collectively. Excellent.
đ€ Microsoft and Mayo Clinic announced a frontier AI model for healthcare: Announced at Microsoft Build on Tuesday (and a lot on Linkedin ever since then), Mustafa Suleymanâs Microsoft AI now hooks up with Mayo Clinicâs longitudinal dataset of over 60 billion medical records from 320 million patients. The modelâs going to be be owned by Mayo, distributed via Azure Foundry APIs, and itâs described as supporting âthe broadest scope of clinical reasoning.â Things not mentioned (hence weâre quite unsure of): benchmarks, pricing, regulatory status, peer-reviewed evidence and external release timeline. Once I hear about some of those, Iâll allow myself to get more hyped. Until then, Iâll keep checking Linkedin. Sounds cool though.
đ§Ș Seoul National University Hospital and Harvard built a virtual hospital to test medical AI before it touches real patients: SNUH and Harvard Medical School have created the Clinical Environment Simulator, which unfortunately isnât a gamified VR version of medical school, but fortunately is a framework for testing LLM-based medical AI in a realistic simulated environment before deployment. It uses a Patient Engine that generates virtual symptom trajectories based on specialist-defined disease templates and real EMR data, and a Hospital Engine that replicates real workflow conditions including bed status, staff availability, and resource allocation. You can trigger crisis scenarios and the AIâs timing decisions affect patient outcomes in the simulation before anyone uses it in the real world. Would be very cool to see them create a live leaderboard of how all the LLMs are doing (like the above).
đ° Garner Health closes $100M Series E at $2.74 billion, twice its valuation from three months ago: US care navigation startup Garner Health has raised $100m in a Series E led by Index Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures alongside (what a list, by the way). The model uses over 60 billion medical records to score physicians on clinical quality, then financially incentivise employers and employees to choose better-rated doctors. Went from a $1.35B valuation in February to $2.74B now. So to be clear, in the time they created $1.4bn in value, I havenât even cleared my notifications.
đïž Novellia raises $18M to let patients own and sell their own health data to pharma: This has been coming and I think itâs a great direction for patient data ownership⊠New York-based Novellia has raised an $18m Series A for a platform that lets patients aggregate up to 20 years of medical records across multiple providers and choose to share anonymised data with pharmaceutical companies for research. Currently, brokers build research datasets from insurance claims and hospital records without any patient involvement or payment, so people are making bank on your info, which has always seemed unfair. This changes that. Top-10 pharma companies are already customers. Can enough patients be motivated to share to get to critical mass? Will pharma pay enough for consented data versus scraped data? Interesting.
đ HSSIB warns NHS trusts are managing digital safety risks from ePMA systems largely alone: ePMA software (the electronic systems hospitals use to prescribe and administer drugs) is meant to reduce medication errors, and a lot of the time it does. But everyoneâs favourite branch, The Healthcare Safety Investigation Response Branch, has published a report saying there are no core national safety standards for how these systems are designed or procured, which leaves wide variation between trusts and real confusion about whether it's the CQC or the MHRA who's supposed to be watching. The good news is the report names the gap clearly and lays out exactly how to close it, and with the single patient record on its way, there's never been a better moment to build this in from the ground up.
Pigeon insider is the upgraded newsletter for those of you that want deep research, analysis and to steal the ideas to sound incredibly smart in front of everyone else.
This weekâs edition looks at two separate ultrasound AI companies that I recently had on The Healthtech Podcast. The founders are from completely different backgrounds, but both companies have great traction, great tech, regulatory approval and could each be generationally important.
For investors, founders and buyers, this one has everything about the ultrasound AI market that you need to know.
What to listen to đ
This week I sat down with Dr Tom Chambers, anaesthetist and Co-founder and CMO of Theta Sleep, to unpack why 9.2 million people in the UK are living with undiagnosed sleep apnoea, why CPAP has an image problem, and how shifting diagnosis and treatment into the home could fix a supply-and-demand crisis the NHS isn't built to solve.
With NHS Online now formally established, this documentary-style episode from Digital Health's Tammy Lovell and Jordan Sollof is essential context. Starts with a 70-something widow in the Midlands who feels locked out of an increasingly digital system. Required listening before getting too enthusiastic about NHS Online.
Russ Branzell, CEO of CHIME, and Anupama Ambe of Kyndryl on how health systems are actually approaching modernisation right now: AI adoption, hybrid cloud, cyber resilience, and the operational pressures that make all of it harder than the brochure suggests. Ambe brings 25 years of transformation experience and is usefully blunt about what works.
Resources đ
đ§ Curious about a move into healthtech?: For any clinicians weighing up a career in healthtech, Dr Yath Prem has written a whopping 105 pages covering how the ecosystem works, translating clinical experience into business language, CVs, interviews, salary and equity, and 50 UK companies to follow. And he walked the walk⊠(FY2 to senior clinical product role in under four years). Pigeon readers get 25% off with the code SOMX.
Events đ
đŹđ§ London Tech Week 2026
đ
8â12 June 2026
đŹđ§ Olympia London
The big one for the wider UK tech ecosystem. Healthtech track expanding year-on-year.
đ€ Health & Tech Collective X London Tech Week Super Connector
đ
9 June 2026
đŹđ§ 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 whoâs who in health innovation, so if youâd like to get in amongst it, DM Ian Coyne.
đïž NHS Confed Expo 2026
đ
10â11 June 2026
đŹđ§ Manchester Central
The UKâs 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.
đ Hale House 1st Birthday Party + HLTH Europe Warmup
đ
11 June 2026
đŹđ§ 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, Londonâs 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 UKâs biggest names in Health journalism. A little bird also said there might even be a ticket to HLTH in the stakes too⊠but youâd have to head over to Portland Place to find out.
đŁ Hash It Out: Real-World Innovation Implementation (Hale House)
đ
Tuesday 23rd June, 17:30
đŹđ§ Hale House, 76 Portland Place,
London Hale Houseâs 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 youâre building anything that has to land inside the NHS.
HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
đ
24 June (Summit) and 25â26 June (Forum)
đșđž Renaissance Boston Seaport District, Boston
The Summit is an invite-only gathering of 65 senior healthcare executives working through AI governance, implementation, and risk in one room, no keynote theatre, just structured roundtables and a private dinner. The Forum that follows across 25â26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomXâs events roundup for everything else.
Jobs for humansđ”ïžââïž
đïž Group Chief Digital Officer, Barts Health NHS Trust (London). One of the largest NHS trusts in the country wants its most senior digital leader⊠five hospitals, a major ICS role across North East London, and accountability for EPR, cyber, data and the full technology portfolio. If you want to run digital transformation at NHS scale rather than advise on it from the outside, this is the job.
𧏠Clinician Scientist, Pangaea Data (London / San Francisco, hybrid). Imperial-rooted AI startup, backed by Lord David Prior and former Novartis CIO, building clinical reasoning tools that find undiagnosed and undertreated patients at the point of care. A genuine clinical brain role working directly with clinicians and pharma clients on AI that actually reaches patients.
đ Clinical Product Manager, Healthtech-1 (London). The team automating GP practice admin (new patient registrations, lab report processing, the mundane work that consumes 35% of NHS staff time) want a clinical PM to help build the parts of the patient journey that come next.
đŹ Medical Device Quality Engineer, Scarlet (London). Scarlet is the AI medical device certification company trying to make regulatory approval fast enough to not strangle innovation. If you know your way around ISO 13485 and EU MDR and the idea of auditing the most ambitious medical AI companies in the world sounds interesting rather than terrifying, they want to hear from you.
đŹ Implementation Manager, Primary Care, Accurx (London, with practice travel). Accurx is in 98% of GP practices and the Implementation Manager role is the thing that makes adoption actually stick: onboarding new users, building relationships across practices, and feeding what you learn back into the product. For anyone with a primary care or NHS operations background who wants to see the NHS work better in a way they can directly point to.
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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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