#299: Who gets sued when AI used by 505,000 NHS staff goes rogue?
The weekly (now definitely longer than) one-minute healthtech roundup, by SomX.
Sup gang. So Claude’s Fable model got released this week cueing the usual exhaustion and overwhelm from being told that “this model changes everything.” I can confirm that for most it has changed nothing. Happy people are still very happy. And chronically unproductive workaholics now have another tool and another reason to say how busy they are. Excellent.
Here’s a tip though… rather than burning through some planet-warming tokens for the sheer heck of it, connect Claude to your emails, Slack, call transcripts, CRM and anything else you can think of and ask Fable to “look through all my connectors and tell me what you can build to make my life easier.” If you’re lucky, something on there might be useful. If not, recycle that tip on LinkedIn for a few likes either way.
Anyway, this week, 505,000 NHS staff are getting Copilot and the MPS (medical defence lawyers) immediately asked who gets sued when it goes wrong. Also, Apple has finally noticed that half its users go through the menopause.
News Bites 🥪
📎 The NHS just gave 505,000 staff a Copilot: Strong start. NHS England confirmed that it’s rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and support staff. Remember the trial thing they did before? 30,000 people, 90 orgs, saved staff an average of 43 minutes a day… yeah, this follows that. Full rollout due by October. A minor point is that the same trial found Copilot occasionally hallucinated incorrect medication dosages in draft letters and tripped over niche clinical terminology, but hey, it’s being rolled out at ludicrous scale, so I’m sure that’s sorted.
⚖️ And here’s who gets sued when the Copilot is wrong: And right on cue, the Medical Protection Society said the NHS could be sued for negligence when an AI tool gets it wrong, which leaves clinicians as (wait for it) the “liability sink” for systems they didn’t build, train or choose. Awesome. Surprisingly enough, “liability sink” is only the 14th most ridiculous term used in recent years to describe the people that go to work in sh** conditions for sh** pay and save your and your family’s lives. The top 13?
Militant. Daily Mail, Wes Streeting.
Self-indulgent. Independent, Wes Streeting.
Dangerous. Independent, same man.
Juvenile delinquents. Yep, actual phrase, Independent.
Workshy. Daily Mail.
Greedy and entitled. Daily Mail.
Bungling. Mail Online.
Perverted. Mail Online.
“Lucky” to work part-time. Telegraph.
Lazy. Oxford study analysing literature, published in BJGP
Selfish. Same study
Sexually disinhibited. Unbelievably, this isn’t a joke, it’s the same study.
Violent. Same study, the note it ends on.
Can’t think why they’re leaving the NHS. Can you?
💰 Semble raises £30m to glue outpatients together: Not the actual people, we obviously mean the tech. Whopper of a Series C here for one interoperable platform that plugs into 1,200-odd external tools (diagnostics, billing, labs). They reckon more than 10 million patients (roughly 1/6 people in the UK), have now received care from a clinician using it. Pigeon has a soft spot for the unglamorous plumbing of healthcare, because the plumbing is usually where it all goes wrong. Interoperability getting a £30m cheque instead of a strongly worded strategy document? We’ll take it.
💃 Apple’s Health app discovers the menopause exists: At WWDC this week, Apple announced that its Health app is adding perimenopause and menopause support to its existing cycle-tracking feature, which, you know, is double edged. On one hand, a $trillion company finally building for a demographic the entire industry spent two decades ignoring is a genuine win, and their phenomenal distribution makes it meaningful. On the other, it feels like women’s health startups have been screaming into the void about exactly this for at least a decade. Is there going to be any clinical depth? Who knows. The bar has been raised by the founders and teams we talk about here often, so let’s see what happens.
🩺 Joyvié raises £771k to fix a problem nobody wants to talk about: Faecal incontinence affects around 656 million people worldwide and has seen pretty much zero product innovation in decades. What’s on the market now traps stool against the skin (causing breakdown, infection and a quiet loss of dignity), but Joyvié’s patent-pending design captures it in a disposable pouch, claiming around 90% less skin contact and 70% faster changes in early testing. Founder Zoe Robson built it after watching her father lose his dignity to a nappy in his final weeks. Exactly the kind of unglamorous, high-burden, carers-shoulder-most-of-it problem that we love to skip in favour of another longevity app. Pigeon is firmly in this nest. More of this, please.
🏥 01Health raises €12.9m to drag specialist care out of the hospital: London’s 01Health (previously 32co) has banked a €12.9m ($15m) Series A to scale a platform that lets local clinics deliver specialist care that normally lives in hospitals and big-city centres. It’s a fascinating model and I looked into it in detail for Pigeon insider. It’s founded by former NHS doctor (and ex-BCG) Dr Sonia Szamocki, (who I also had on The Healthtech Podcast) and it’s launching as a standalone product other clinics can license, with US trials underway. One to watch if you’ve ever been referred by your GP and the appointment you waited months for took 2 seconds, which left you wondering “what a waste.”
And finally…
🍫Rem3dy Health raises €16m for personalised nutrition (and, er, pet health): Birmingham’s Rem3dy Health, parent of personalised-nutrition brand Nourished, has raised €16m (£14m) to push into the US, MENA and India. They’re also moving into, and Pigeon promises this is real, personalised health solutions for pets. We have questions. Mostly about the dog’s macros. Jokes aside, a regional UK scale-up closing a strategic round in this climate is no small thing, and given my brummy routes I’m glad we have something to be proud of alongside being voted worst regional accent with a net score of minus 53. People actually went out of their way to vote us down. Bit harsh.
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 week’s 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 🔊
This week I sat down with THE Professor Shafi Ahmed and we had a superb chat about at what it actually takes to innovate inside a system designed to resist change. He also shared from his perspective what is was like streaming a live colectomy on Google Glass to 14,500 students in 118 countries and how that experience transformed surgical innovation. Whopper episode.
Also a whopper episode. Deborah Cohen, the award winning, medically qualified broadcaster, journalist and editor, joins host Annabel for a discussion exploring how social media has become a major source of health information (right up our street) and how it is reshaping the way medical ideas, diagnoses, and treatments are promoted and consumed.
Resources 📚
🧭 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 📅
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.
HIMSS AI Leadership Summit + AI in Healthcare Forum
📅 24 June (Summit) and 25–26 June (Forum)
🇺🇸 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 25-26 June is open to all healthcare professionals and goes deep on real-world AI application across clinical, operational, and enterprise domains.
Healthtech Integrates 2026
📅 1 July
🇬🇧 London
An in-person event in London focusing on healthcare technology innovations and networking opportunities.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomX’s events roundup for everything else.
Jobs for humans🕵️♀️
🔌 Technical Product Manager, Integration, Heidi - Heidi doesn’t need much of an intro. This role owns the integration layer that makes all of it actually talk to Epic, Cerner, Athena and the rest without forcing a single clinician to think about FHIR. If you understand why EMR write-back is where good healthtech goes to die, and you'd rather build a framework than firefight bespoke connectors for three regions at once, this is the job worth having.
💞 Head of Growth, Hertility - Hertility’s at-home hormone and fertility testing has cut the wait for some diagnoses from nine years to six days, and now they want a growth leader to own the entire DTC engine across testing, clinical services, subscriptions and the app. Move quickly though, applications close Friday 19th June.
🧮 Head of Data ,Semble - Fresh off that £30m payday, they’re hiring someone to own data strategy. Real scale, genuinely messy real-world clinical data, and a company with the funding to actually do something with it. Expect a bit of competition for this one. If you do get an interview. Check out my podcast episode with Christoph, the co-founder and CEO.
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