Hello healthtech fans.
This week⊠Dating app becomes pharmacy, the government says yes to absolutely everything, and NHS England has written its anxieties down in a public document. Completely normal week.
Also this week, I canât face a full story on this, but RFK Jr told the MAHA Summit that AI gives a better second opinion than any doctor. Basically this sums up the state of media pretty well⊠âuninformed person gives uninformed opinion, journalists cause a scene.â
You wouldnât get annoyed with a toddlerâs take on string theory, so I suggest you think of this like that. There might be a grain of truth buried in there somewhere, but save your energy. Until patient safety is seriously on the line. Then we fly at dawn.
Jessica and I talk about it on this weekâs podcastâŠ
James
Shameless self-promotion? Absolutely. But if you read this newsletter then (1) you have a sense of humour and (2) you know healthtech. That means you might be ideal for one of our open roles:
Whichever role you go for, you'd work across strategy, content/social, PR, events, media production and creator management for our healthtech, biotech and pharma clients. If youâre creative, understand science and tech, and/or you can keep a client calm at 6pm on a Friday, we'd love to hear from you. And if you found out about the role from Pigeon, let us know in your application.
News Bites đ„Ș
đłïžâđ Grindr Wants to Be Your Doctor Now: I mentioned this one last week, and since the dustâs now settled, letâs look at this properly. Grindr (LGBTQ+ dating app) is paying $250m for PurposeMed, the parent company of Freddie (provides telehealth access to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis), which serves about 25,000 active patients. Thatâs a whopping sum and Grindrâs CEO reckons its health arm could eventually be as large as, if not larger than, core Grindr. There are a couple of things here. I think this is a great example of healthcare reaching people where they are and an area of medicine that delivers better care with clinicians and process specific to its needs having a system built around it. But itâs also more proof of what feels like âTelemedicine 3.0: Become a full health systemâ with the likes of wearable companies and alike all wanting in on a similar model. I wouldnât be surprised at all if Grindr came out with a wearable*.
đ€ All 44 recommendations for AI regulation accepted: Remember Clippy? If you do, just think back to that glorious time when innovation meant adding emojis to MSN and bear in mind THAT was the last time medical device regulations were written. Lots to look forward to in these reccos⊠AI products can be updated without going back to the start of the queue, a shift away from front-loaded pre-market approval towards proper post-market surveillance, a public adverse incident database, and AI Airlock phase 3⊠But also lots of âexploreâ and âconsider,â rather than âwill execute flawlessly and immediately.â Good progress though.
â ïž NHS England Admits Being Slow on Tech: The thought of all my documented SomX insecurities becoming public information is the stuff of nightmares, but a public sector organisationâs risk register is exactly that. Technology and innovation risk has gone from an 8 to a 12, with cyber holding firm at a mega 25, the top mark you can get. Why 8 to 12? Slow delivery on the FDP, NHS App, single patient record and ambient voice, a lot of organisations failing DSPT standards, and no unified AI vision. Ouch. Root causes? Capacity, money, recruitment, approval bottlenecks and projects with no detailed operational plans. Awks.
đ« Transplanted hearts take on the biological age of their new owner [Nature]: Right, nobody tell Bryan Johnson or he might misunderstand and go rogue with a circular saw. A Harvard team grafted hearts between young, middle-aged and old mice and found that their DNA methylation clocks drifted towards the age of the host. Literally, old hearts got biologically younger in young recipients, and young hearts aged faster in old ones. They then looked at 11 human transplants and found the same pattern, and one-year measures like exercise capacity tracked the recipientâs age more closely than the donorâs. Caveats are that itâs a preprint with an n of 11, and a younger methylation age doesnât undo coronary arteries full of lipid deposits, but this is very interesting.
đ§ The Next Wearable Goes on Your Head: And finally⊠weâve had rings, patches and watches, now a pill-shaped device taped to the side of your head tracks âBrain Flowâ (a proxy for cerebral blood flow) and an âEntropyâ score described outrageously as the bodyâs real-time cost of being alive. The science rests on a Gravity Ageing Hypothesis, which is the idea that a lifetime of sitting and standing makes the heart work harder to get blood to the brain, and that might feed into ageing. Comparisons against transcranial Doppler look alright, but in small groups of healthy young people, partly (again) in a preprint, with validation still underway.
What to Listen to đ
I read a Substack recently about how weâre all documenting our lives like influencers even if we arenât one, and Everything Is Content highlight that concept, whilst chatting through interesting healthtech topics. Our generation were the first to track everything, and possibly first to get anxious about it. Have you ever woken up feeling fine until your sleep score told you otherwise? How ludicrous that sounds in writing, but the placebo effect is real and thriving, and sold to us for a monthly fee.
Ever wondered who's to blame when the AI your doctor uses gets it wrong? Turns out it's a proper headache to work out. Host Rosalind English and two barristers from 1 Crown Office Row explain why a contract can't just settle it: most of us get our care through the NHS, where there isn't one to fall back on. So all a contract really does is let the companies squabble among themselves over who's at fault. I can already hear Shaggy's It Wasn't Me playing in the background.
This one's even better in hindsight. Prof Alastair Denniston, who chaired the commission, sat down to talk through his recommendations, and two weeks later the government accepted all 44 of them, mostly pencilled in for Spring 2027. My question is whether anything in the 44 covers who's actually building and testing these tools. Since finding out that women were routinely excluded from clinical trials (even when it was CONCERNING THEIR TREATMENT) until the 1990s, I'll be asking this of every new rulebook from now on.
Events đ
Hash It Out: Uncharted Territory, Entering New Markets
đïž Tue 13 Oct, 6â8pm
đ đŹđ§ Hale House, London.
This Tuesday, so clear your diary now. Grindr just paid $250m for a PrEP company whose model wouldnât work here, which says everything about picking your next market. Come and hear from people whoâve got the passport stamp, and come find me because Iâm co-hosting.
BMJ Future Health Europe
đïž 29â30 Oct
đ đŹđ§ The Brewery, London.
This is the one for clinicians who want to build things without quitting the day job, and thereâs a whole women in healthcare track Iâll be heading straight for. Every session is CPD certified, so you can call it training (your manager doesnât need to know about the drinks after).
AI in Health Summit
đïž 4 Nov
đ đŹđ§ Royal College of Physicians, London.
Economist Impact is asking why barely anyone has scaled AI properly, a month after our government said yes to 44 recommendations and pencilled most of them in for spring. Norwayâs medical devices regulator is speaking, so someone please ask how long their homework takes.
Visit the SomX events page or subscribe to SomXâs events roundup for everything else.
Opportunities đ”ïžââïž
â Enterprise Customer Success Manager (NHS), Heim: A superb job if you know how NHS Trusts work, youâve rolled out software before, and you want your next role to put clinicians back in front of patients. Heimâs tech powers >20,000 hours of NHS community care and cuts nursesâ drive time by 42%. Youâd own the biggest NHS relationships and work with everyone from frontline teams to Trust COOs. ÂŁ55k to ÂŁ70k plus bonus and equity, 33 daysâ holiday (plus your birthday off), London hybrid, and a team of clinicians and technologists who clearly know their stuff. Featured.
𫧠MHRA AI Airlock, Phase 3: The government said yes to all 44 recommendations we covered earlier, and this is the bit you can actually do something with. Itâs the MHRAâs sandbox where AI device makers test their product with the regulator watching, and this round is all about what happens after launch (aka the exact thing the commission wants policed). Itâs free to apply, and thereâs a webinar for applicants on 22 October at 10am if you want to sniff it out first.
đŠ Partnerships Lead (UK&I), Heidi: They went from $1m to $50m in recurring revenue in two years and just landed US$340m, so the Australians are clearly here to stay. Youâd be the one plugging Heidi into the record systems GPs and hospitals already use, so it suits someone who speaks both sales and tech. Itâs hybrid, and you get your birthday off, which would work on me. (Heard you loud and clear there, Anna - James)
đą Social Media Consultant, TORTUS: The British answer to Heidi, and very much the intentional tortoise in this race (their branding, not mine). They say they were the first ambient voice tool to get UKCA Class IIa, so whoever lands this gets to post about a product with actual evidence behind it, which is rarer in healthtech than it should be. Bonus points if you can make a medical device certificate go viral.
Jamesâ editor notes:
* Yep the wearable penis ring exists, and strap in because a journal called âTraslational Andrology and Urologyâ expressed the following:
Wearable penile devices (WPDs) offer real-time data on erectile function, providing critical insights into nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) patterns that can indicate underlying health issues.
A WPD has potential to advance erectile function monitoring by providing real-time data on NPT and intra-coital activity. It has promise in detecting early dysfunction, assessing cardiovascular risk, and enhancing proactive health management.
By measuring parameters like firmness, girth expansion, and the frequency of erections, they enable proactive monitoring of erectile health, potentially predicting conditions like erectile dysfunction (ED) and cardiovascular disease earlier than traditional methods.
There you have it. Donât say we never tackle the hard things in Pigeon.
đŁ Want something in front of our 8,000+ readers?
You can break your news as the main story, feature a podcast, job or event... and we even have a few sponsorship packages to choose from...
We review everything editorially - if it is not right for our audience, weâll let you know - everything has to be valuable to this glorious community.
See you next week, Pigeon fans âđŒ
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.