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Health Tech Weekly Round Up: 8 February

Hotwire Global

As we close our ‘Health Tech New Year’s Resolutions’ series, take a look the latest contributions from Tamir Strauss, Head of Tech & Product at Medopad and Jerry Wilmink, Chief Business Officer at CarePredict.

Microsoft Healthcare reveals more of its strategy with new cloud and AI products for hospitals

Microsoft announced the expansion of its healthcare offering, adding three new innovative tools. The company is making its Health Bot Service available to hospitals, as well as adding more healthcare-specific features to Teams. Additionally, new health-record integration capabilities will be added to Azure and Teams, introducing its cloud and AI capabilities into this new environment. The company continues to make great strides in the health tech vertical, following restructuring all health tech activity under the Microsoft Healthcare umbrella last year. This will be showcased at the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) next week for those looking to find out more.

Smartphone urinalysis firm raises $18 million in funding round

Smartphone urinalysis firm Healthy.io raised $18 million in Series B funding for its kidney testing service. The service achieved a 71% adherence rate amongst patients with hypertension in trials, and has since been rolled out alongside the NHS. The founder and CEO of Healthy.io, Yonatan Adiri, maintained that Healthy.io is “reinventing existing paradigms of prevention” through its home-based service, and this funding could have the potential to benefit millions, reducing long-term costs for the NHS significantly. The funding received contributions from Samsung and other private investors, and will be used to continue developing the service in the UK while expanding to the US. This funding follows a number of other milestones for Healthy.co this year, including FDA clearance and a global partnership with Siemens Healthineers.

Meditation app Calm hits unicorn status with fresh $88 million funding

Meditation and wellness app, Calm, has closed an $88 million Series B funding deal. The app provides a range of tools for mindfulness, including guided meditation sessions and ‘Sleep Stories’. As the popularity of meditation has increased amongst consumers, Calm has achieved significant growth, with 40 million downloads worldwide and over 1 million paid subscriptions. Co-founder and CEO, Michael Acton Smith, stated: “We started as a meditation app, but have grown far beyond that. Our vision is to build one of the most valuable and meaningful brands of the 21st century. Health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry and we believe there is a big opportunity to build the leading company in this fast growing and important space.”

Philips adds new solutions to IntelliSpace Enterprise Edition

Philips has added new solutions to its IntelliSpace Enterprise Edition that uses adaptive intelligence to enable health systems to make informed medical decisions for patients. These include the IntelliSpace Precision Medicine Oncology, Exchange and Medicine Genomics solutions. Combined, these enable workflow solutions for healthcare organisations to launch precision medicine programmes, easy information exchange, and a medical data platform which provides an informed diagnostic and therapeutic view. Philips Connected Care chief business leader Carla Kriwet said: “In the constantly evolving health IT landscape, we’re dedicated to working with leading hospital organisations…to provide them the most advanced technology and adaptive intelligence to manage vast amounts of patient-generated data to help drive precision diagnosis.”

NHS to make flash glucose monitoring devices available to more diabetes patients

Patients with Type 1 diabetes can now measure their condition more easily, as wearable glucose sensors were made available on prescription this week. The Freestyle Libre device made up of a sensor that pierces the patient’s skin, and a reader, which is used to scan the sensor to provide glucose level readings. Patients can also opt to use a smartphone app to scan the sensor. According to Professor Azhar Farooqi, GP and Chair of the Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group, “We know that Freestyle Libre can potentially improve the quality of life for many patients and makes it much easier to control their diabetes. We anticipate that between one in four and one in five people with Type 1 diabetes will now be able to use this device.”


Interesting reads for the weekend: