In short
Health tech journalism and evidence—how journalists verify “objective truth” using underreported data and on-the-ground reporting, plus what women’s symptom data and CGM research reveal about assumptions in health tech.
Guest
Cate Lawrence (Tech.eu journalist). Background: Australian; previously co-founded an NGO in Australia on sustainability for renters (including smart energy home monitoring). Moved to Europe; worked as an IoT journalist for a Silicon Valley publication. Writes crisis reporting (e.g., Ukraine) and health/women’s health pieces, including on Hello Inside (continuous glucose monitoring).
Key claims
Wearables/AI optimism has cycles, but better tech enables better expectations. Health tech impact requires evidence (research papers, insurer adoption), not just data. Journalism can change industry narratives via “butterfly effects.”
Notable examples
Hello Inside’s unpublished dataset (66,000 symptom logs from 1,743 women over 90 days) found fatigue as the top symptom, not weight loss; program delivered via a major German health insurer. Ukraine example: Lumify VR for clinicians/mental health, including veterans, reporting ~20–30% anxiety reduction.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnpublished Data Set Discovery
0:00 to 0:25
Learn about an unpublished data set of symptoms reported by women.
“We've been sitting on an unpublished data set.”
Importance of Health Tech Journalism
1:15 to 2:23
The discussion highlights the important role of journalists in the health tech sector.
Cate's Background and Journey
2:23 to 3:35
Cate Lawrence shares her unconventional journey into health tech journalism.
Comparison of Health Tech with Other Sectors
3:35 to 5:15
A discussion on the performance of health tech compared to fintech and food tech.
The Evolution of Wearables and Data Insight
5:15 to 7:35
Insights into the evolution of wearable technology and its impact on health.
“They're better than they were, but they're not great.”
The Role of AI in Health Tech
7:35 to 10:35
Exploring how AI is reshaping expectations and capabilities in health technology.
The Responsibility of Health Tech Journalism
10:35 to 11:25
Discussing the ethical responsibility journalists have in health reporting.
The Process of Health Tech Reporting
11:25 to 14:01
Cate shares her process for reporting on health tech startups and their impact.
“So for new healthcare, whether it's drugs or it's therapeutic methods or treating women's health conditions, because the data is that they're not.”
The Role of Journalism in Health Tech
14:01 to 18:12
Explore the nuances of how journalists uncover truth in health tech stories.
“and the assumptions might not be accurate.”
Innovative Health Solutions and Their Challenges
18:13 to 22:06
Discussing the barriers and innovative approaches in health technology.
“Um, the stuff that's done to identify skin cancer is very interesting, particularly, you know, moles that might be at risk and things like that as an Australian.”
Show all 16 chapters
On-ground Reporting in Ukraine's Health Tech
22:07 to 24:14
Insights on the importance of firsthand reporting in tech journalism.
“So it's a product in a product, I guess.”
Emerging Technologies in Mental Health Treatment
24:15 to 28:00
A look at how technology is reshaping mental health care practices.
“kicked he decided he was going to do something else you know he was going to pivot to something with impact for Ukraine, building something for Ukraine in Ukraine.”
Exploring Funding Trends in Health Tech
28:00 to 30:30
Learn about the importance of funding rounds in understanding health tech market trends.
“Like obviously the Nordics has always been a great health tech space because of the obvious companies that are present there, the larger companies that have their own investment arms, the CBCs.”
Europe vs. US in Health Tech
30:30 to 33:13
Discover the differences between the health tech landscapes in Europe and the US.
“What's your feeling on Europe versus the US at the moment?”
Optimism and Challenges in Health Tech
33:13 to 35:35
Examine the optimistic outlook for health tech amidst potential challenges.
“Meet a lot of companies working on tooling now, ex-surgeons that are looking at, you know, I need this tool when I'm doing brain surgery or something like that.”
Connecting Startups and Journalists
35:35 to 37:04
Understand how startups can effectively reach out to journalists for coverage.
“And I say this to people that don't have agencies.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02We've been sitting on an unpublished data set. 66 ,000 symptom logs from 1 ,743 women tracked continuously with glucose monitors over 90 days. Healthcare is probably one of the most optimistic reasons for AI. The number one symptom women report isn't what anyone in the industry assumes. The biggest symptom women we're dealing with is f***. Hey, really? Welcome to another episode of the Health Tech Podcast. today. Bit of a different flavour for you, not a startup founder for a change. We are speaking to, well, I'm speaking to a few journalists in health tech actually, because journalists are an interesting breed of people in the health tech space because they cover lots of different things, lots of different stories, really interesting vantage points.
0:48The research that has to go into good journalism means that journalists have really interesting perspectives and they have context and what we like on this podcast is a nice long-form conversation with context and actually I think the art of journalism is something to be respected in this modern day most listeners will know that I write Health Tech Pigeon I've started Pigeon Insider which is another long-form deep dive of lots of different info and I think it's really important that we respect the art of journalism and media in holding industries to account and actually that's one of the things that I was super passionate about I used to write for Forbes on health tech as a contributor as a lot of people might know that listen to this and so I've got a real respect for the amount of research that goes into it the integrity that you have to uphold and actually the impact that you can have and I have someone with me this week delighted to welcome Kate who writes for tech.eu and Kate is a wonderful example of all of those things I would say I've read your work for a long time Kate the luminifying Ukraine and doing lots of sort of crisis-based journalism I guess you report on raises like ditto that I wrote in health tech pigeon recently a real sort of patient empowerment example um you've written about women's health about cgms company called hello inside recently so yeah looking forward to talking about all of that with you but first of all welcome and how are you i'm very well thank you so much for having me looking forward to it and looking forward to a great chat awesome and you're europe based aren't you so you based austria germany in germany um but i'm not german my accent might give me away i'm actually australian awesome and how did you how did you end up as a journalist what was your what was your route into it um a very unconventional one um basically my previous job to this was um i co-founded a um ngo in australia focusing on sustainability in rental accommodation so how how renters could be sustainable when they weren't necessarily having a lot of decision making power in terms of how they lived and were being left out of and you know policy wise legislative wise everything the sustainability movement nice so we did lots of things we did lots of lobbying we did um hundreds of workshops we did um government programs you know local government not sort of you know big national government we would have a better um state of sustainability for renters in Australia a bunch of different things a lot of stuck with refugees and new migrants and we did that for about seven years and there was really a direct crossover with sustainability because when we were doing it in the 2010s Australia was rolling out its smart energy home monitoring so that you could you could measure the efficacy of your appliances at home but also your meter and all those things and get that data to your to your at the time it would have been um you know like web-based but later on of course an app but we were one of if not the first uh country to do that so it really had this sort of direct impact of new tech and ushering new tech to um a somewhat you know at times a very skeptical audience you know um sustainability is still very loaded as a concept in Australia and so you know I do a lot of it sort of tech education sort of stuff with that and when I moved to Europe which you know was basically for a sea change bit of burnout was asked to do some writing around tech and obviously having done the the smart home stuff the IOT side of it my first job just purely coincidentally or main job was working as an IOT journalist for a Silicon Valley publication so that's how I kind of got into it amazing and you write about lots of different stuff don't you so you're you write about tech broadly i guess health tech obviously being one of those things what's your what's your passion with with health tech what's your relationship with health tech how do you feel about health tech in comparison to those other sectors because i mean the reason i ask is because obviously you know listening to this podcast will be very much within the health tech space and it's all we know it's all we talk about we actually we used to do something in health tech pigeon we used to we used to compare the numbers like the the investment numbers in q1 q2 q3 with fintech and we had this sort of like unofficial not that they knew or cared but this sort of race with fintech to who was gonna be performing the best in terms of financial numbers in pigeon and obviously health tech was it actually did okay for a lot of it but fintech obviously winning majorly in terms of uh definitely people claiming exit it's funny you say that um I've actually got to write up a report later in this week about food tech and the numbers.
5:47Really? They're better than they were, but they're not great. You know, so sometimes you can, part of a journalist is often we do have things that we're interested in and you champion them yourself, you know, in your own kind of way. And sometimes when the data doesn't match, you kind of get. Yeah. And health tech is a really good example of that because, you know, starting off, you know, back in the 2010s, you know, yeah, I'm all. IoT, obviously it had the synergy with wearables, right? Including date-driven wearables for health biometrics and so forth. And but then it was just, you know, there was so much optimism about it.
6:24I wrote about it a lot. I tested a lot of wearables. I had for a long time a little graveyard of redundant wearables because the platforms went bankrupt. Oh, yeah. Many, many, most, I think most, and actually gave those to a hacker. Nice. eventually to play with. But, you know, it was a time when, you know, the idea of the quantified self, you know, biohacking became such a thing and the idea that we could actually get this information that previously maybe was only done through more invasive metrics, whether it was, you know, blood tests or other ways of, you know, a sleep test or something that was quite invasive.
7:05Suddenly we could become, you know, our own agent of health and have that agency to find insights um and you know some of it kind of worked a lot of it didn't work where it kind of comes full circle now and this is i mentioned this very intentionally is that there's a kind of a renewed optimism because ai and you know yes i'm sure you talk about a lot one of the best things for me as a journalist in this space is that a lot of things that were promised that didn't quite work now work it's so true i've actually just written down it hasn't actually changed a lot but it's true that that initial excitement and it's funny how terms come and go as well like in the internet of things iot i remember that term and as if it was yesterday but that term is definitely gone like it's hard it's hardly ever used if if it's all now yeah exactly but it's it's funny isn't it that the it's also because a lot of the wearables that were created we don't need because that's so true the fun that's so true but it has meant you're absolutely right that the optimism has always been there and even thinking about you know the piece that you wrote on hello inside the you know continuous glucose monitors you know metabolic insights um you know someone there the founder his family had diabetes but he used the continuous glucose monitor anyway just to see his insights and he found loads of insights and then he thought you know how can we apply this to other things then women's health care it's like we've we've always it's like this frontier bit of the quantified self has kind of been there since the iot days because you're absolutely right that the technology is getting way better but therefore so are our expectations of it and our belief in what can actually be done and that's I guess what's so nice to write about in a way particularly if it's a passion of yours because there seems to always be a story and that isn't really going anywhere because even if you look at I mean have you been following much of like the google stuff whoop like the all the all the bands of just now everyone's like moving towards this almost almost becoming healthcare ecosystems they're all going to the same place aren't they like everyone's going to a place where you've got a wearable an ai layer and then an actual health care layer of telemedicine and everyone seems to be like going to the same point so i don't know it's a fascinating space yeah and the intelligence layer as well of what we do with that data how we apply that how we how we make sense of it who makes sense of it you know and where does it go exactly like is it you know i think one of the most exciting things apple ever did was when they released their apple health kit so that people could actually become participants in research you know that citizen citizen science kind of thing um where if you um i can't think off the top of my head any particular conditions but they were actively scouting for areas where there had been you know a pain point of not having enough patient data to actually be able to whether it was you know control people or you know people that were in the study to actually make um make outcomes and now it's that now that's sped up 10 times you know you have all this data which again has its own challenges you know how we how we collect and collate and clean the data and all that other stuff which is where ai is also coming to itself when you're looking at like all of this stuff obviously there's the good there's the good the bad and the ugly isn't there and you yeah you make a habit of actually covering quite a lot of that spectrum i've seen particularly the stuff with the ukraine or the rest of it but there's also the element of when it comes to data and and security and making sure that things are done right when you write a piece like the hello inside piece that covers all that stuff you've you've got of responsibility haven't you to your readers to essentially to make sure everything's fact checked and correct but also there's a lot of i mean this this seems like a grandiose term but there is a lot of power that a journalist has because things will get written things will get syndicated opinions will form we'll report it in health tech pigeon we'll talk about it on our podcast and then people talk about it at an event and people will then say that to me so you know a lot a lot can happen you know butterfly effect wise from an article so a lot has to go into it how do you write when you when you when you're writing about a startup in the health tech space like like that what's your process can you talk me through your process of how you even get because you you wrote a lot in there about the business model and their insurance stuff and you know everything that they were touching it was there's a lot that must go into it you know what um maybe I'll tell you a little bit about how that piece came out came about and it might be interesting to any startups or scale ups listening that are kind of a bit about yes journalists and you know and the biggest barrier barrier to us is we're small teams with large inboxes full and um you know not a lot of time because we also have to do other work like go to conferences and um a bit of commercial work on the side usually to stay um stay afloat so yeah basically um someone had read another piece I had written about a company called Trial Me, which is a Nordic company focused on ensuring that women are participants in health trials.
12:26So for new healthcare, whether it's drugs or it's therapeutic methods or treating women's health conditions, because the data is that they're not. And for a long time, they weren't even required to be active participants in testing things, which is, you know, beyond the pale. And so, yeah, they'd read this piece I'd written with an interview and said, hey, I've actually got this. This is what they said to me. I'm just doing a quick look. Firstly, they contacted me on WhatsApp, which was fine because they knew someone I knew. And they said, we've been sitting on an unpublished data set, 66 ,000 symptom logs from 1 ,740 feet women tracked continuously with glucose monitors over 90 days.
13:13and I'll just read this little bit very quickly. Some of the findings surprised us, starting with the fact that the number one symptom women report isn't what anyone in the industry assumes. And what it was, it's actually, you know, the notion is that people go to sort of these platforms looking to quantify self, and often the biggest thing they're looking for is weight loss. But they actually found that when they went through the data, the biggest symptom women were dealing with was fatigue. So super interesting. And, you know, and so they basically were talking about, you know, we realised that, you know, a lot of these problems around this are about medicine built around male biology and, you know, what happens, our data actually shows when you measure women at scale and the assumptions might not be accurate.
14:03So that kind of stuff, that was the COO who contacted me. That's where it kind of came from. It's really, well, it's interesting, isn't it, that approach because it's it's very intentionally and cleverly worded isn't it to grab you to very unusual quite yeah there's no kind of begging there's no there's no there's no pleading to oh please cover this it's it's here i've i've uncovered an an objective truth that i think aligns with what you like and what you like to write about for the impact that you want to see in the world and for people listening by the way that is how you speak to a journalist because that is what journalists like yourself i imagine are trying to do you're trying to use the pen to see into the world what you want to see and also this it's this it is the search for truth journalism isn't it ultimately because that's that's what you're trying to do you're trying to investigate things in order to uncover truth so that the public and and people know about it because that's ultimately who you're working for i guess in a way i mean yes you have jobs and you and you have people that you have publications that pay you but the goal the goal that you're trying to reach i imagine i don't put words in your mouth but a goal especially with i know what you write about you're trying to uncover truth that people need to know if i've got that right yeah absolutely and i think it's also just that there's a story there that's underreported you know it's having something that people aren't aren't talking about and what was most you know one of the things that was interesting about this story as well is that it had a very direct win which was the company had actually their program is now being delivered through one of Germany's biggest health insurers in Germany where I live health insurance is compulsory so you just pay for it it's not free it's quite expensive and this program is free and so it actually gives it's it's like the holy grail for for a healthcare startup of how do you get to the customer how do you get to the end user some people go through um b2b b2b to c like i like this example um but it really it shows that you know there is a way to achieve this and that to me was also interesting that's also an interesting story there's this story about because when we talk about health tech one of the biggest barriers we see when we interview people or I see is the gap between the data and the impact.
16:33So an example might be, I could have a, you know, a wearable that's tracking a bunch of different metrics. I go to my doctor here in Germany and the doctor says, well, yeah, no, I don't believe any of that. You have to do your own test here. And the waiting list for the test is six months. that could be that could be quite normal so that you know the fact that the you're not getting you know um a meaningful way of getting your your tech recognized and that's that's bad for both the user and the um the company and so i always ask people things like well how do you get people using your tech how you get that impact particularly because a lot of it um some of the tech we cover in health tech is stuff that um the um there's the clinic or the hospital or what have you buy So there's those procurement cycles.
17:23So it's often about what happens there? How do you do all that? And one thing that one of the biggest wins people tell me is actually research. So it's getting your tech into some type of research paper. So it is covered. It is validated. It is found to be, you know, legitimate. And so therefore that gives it a leverage. So when you're doing, which is what Hello Insight did. so when you're looking at getting a health insurer as a customer who interestingly you think they would be doing a lot of this kind of preventative health stuff you know data and you know um they work you know um it gives you that leverage so often there's the story within the story of how do you do it because you know there's a lot of companies doing similar things and the stories how do you do it it's interesting isn't it i mean the that's why i'm finding it increasingly fascinating that the big ai companies the open ais and anthropics they're becoming interoperable with eprs now as and they're trying to sit as the intermediate it's like it's like we talked about the the you've got the wearable then you've got the ai layer and then you've got the healthcare system it's funny that the anthropics and the open ai's with their chat gbt for health and claude healthcare and these types of things are being that kind of the conduit like yeah exactly the conduit yeah exactly by like connecting it all and also abbott now investing in whoop as well and you know big pharma companies big incumbent you know healthcare healthcare stuff like companies are investing in these wearables and you can see how that that bridge between where we are now where a primary care physician or secondary care physician is going to be like i do not trust your wearable data and it's like well actually i can tell you that that whoop data has been used by abbot to infer this medical device or this algorithm so actually i suggest you do take heed of it because it's going to reduce a lot of the amount of work you're going going to have to do downstream and cost and actually is this a way exactly with that is this a way that we start to approach the sustainability of healthcare from actually a completely different angle that no one kind of saw coming five years ago which i think is fascinating yeah i mean and it's there is things that i think are coming that you know the solutions now are good but that will get better.
19:57Like one of the things that interests me about, um, the use of AI and tech, um, for diagnostics, for example, like, um, we have, um, there's a number of, um, clinics now where you can go and get sort of a full, a full checkup, um, looking at your, you know, 3D scans and things like that. Um, the stuff that's done to identify skin cancer is very interesting, particularly, you know, moles that might be at risk and things like that as an Australian. Of course. Super interesting to me because half our population has skin cancer at some stage in their life, unfortunately. But then you're still becoming, who are us, this disconnect where, you know, I could use one of those apps myself.
20:38I can identify a mole that's very risky, but it could take me six months to get an appointment to get. And I do say six months very intentionally because that's how long it takes you to get an appointment with a dermatologist. so i think that the next step will be easing that whether that's through telling medicine which i know is being used for a lot of other executions um so to alleviate some of those pain points for the um yeah for the user the other thing i just want to point out with with your work particularly this article but also the work in ukraine is i mean quite literally the amount of legwork that can go into researching and understanding a space a company even down to an article and so talking about the um like luminify for a second um can you tell me a little bit about that because you met those founders in kiev didn't you um and and you really invest in this kind of on the ground reporting and i just i just want to make this clear before you answer this as well to people listening that this is the this is the art of journalism this is the work of journalism this is why this is why i have such great respect for journalists and actually the the field quite frankly because in order to find objective truth in order to tell the public that you have to do a lot of work including going to kiev to interview founders that are doing something interesting in health tech so do you want to just explain a bit of that to me yeah absolutely and look you know you can of course we are in a digital world i can interview people remotely but of course yeah but you don't always get the same conversations um i've been to ukraine a few times since the full-scale invasion of from russia um i think five times five times um i was i was in keep a couple of weeks ago actually and as a speechy is um a company that's made a product called Numify.
22:38So it's a product in a product, I guess. That's their VR platform. And basically, it's a way of using AI to help in a clinical setting, help clinicians to guide immersive VR, particularly one of the use cases that's become more prevalent is for soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or other types of mental health conditions, which is, you know, completely valid and completely understandable. And it's a very structured program. It's like when we write about a lot of this sort of stuff, like VR and healthcare, psychotropics would be another example. People often think of it as a bit of a Wild West when it's actually not.
23:24It's incredibly regulated, this stuff, you know. These are very structured environments where everything is done with full clinicians and regulation and you know permissions and things like that and um what's interesting about this company um a species and their lumify i'll call it lumify because that's the name of the product you know um was that the guy starting it originally was in automotive doing sort of the automotive stuff things for the for the for the dash dashboard right or the windscreen which again is a super interesting issue because they're literally using that in defense right now for um for tanks and stuff so you can see um what's outside so super interesting um and and cars in battle and things like that vehicles so basically um he was someone and this is something i've heard a lot from ukrainians um when the full stealth invasion kicked he decided he was going to do something else you know he was going to pivot to something with impact for Ukraine, building something for Ukraine in Ukraine.
24:29This is a very, you know, and people often think about Ukraine tech like, oh, you know, you're running about Ukraine because, you know, there's a war, you know, and it's a bit like, no, we've always written about Ukraine. There's always been this massive tech sector. It's been going for a very long time and it's extremely successful. So, you know, it's always been there. And so basically he was, his aim was, you know, I'm using this VR, I know this stuff. We can use this as a tool to help people improve their emotional state. You know, it also solves the problem of stigma when it comes to accessing mental health care.
25:08But also just the challenges of, you know, being in an environment where things are not always happening, you know, in a way that you can plan. You know, there's not always a lot of certainty. Let's put it that way. And again, with this company, what was interesting was the data it got. It got a lot of data that they were able to verify the efficacy of the treatment for veterans, for example. and again publishing that data they found a 20 30 reduction in anxiety and huge numbers huge numbers yeah absolutely and and the other thing they did this is kind of a weird one right was they also are used in the u.s um in assisted living and nursing homes like for old people and stuff like that um as a way to kind of deal with um uh you know deal with you know different emotional states and things like that but it shows that you can you can use one you can you can pursue different markets simultaneously and you can probably use one to fund something else and so i think that's a clever play and also being able to do it in the u.s once you're reg if you can do something in the u.s you can do it anyway right yeah regulation wise absolutely it's interesting that i i know obviously journalists often look for particularly the nationals will look for human stories as well because we can all relate to that sort of stuff it's interesting when you're when you're talking there about someone who is building tech that eventually ends up in defense tech and in tanks that then this sort of thing happens and then pivots towards health tech and therefore you know they find themselves building in health care it must be interesting as a journalist because you view you view new cycles and you become kind of expert in where attention lives if that makes sense and so I'm interested then in with what you write there's almost like a venn diagram of what what you want to write about what's good for the world but then also what gets attention and I'm interested in what is the middle of that venn diagram what is in inverted commas the perfect story for you i think it has to be novel and it has to have impact um for example uh if i think of a health tech example i get pitched a lot it would be medical transcription software yes i was literally i won't mention the event but i was at an event recently with booths or exhibitors and there was at least and they were all you know local relatively local companies i think there was at least five doing many transcriptions yeah you know um it's become kind of one of those easy i i don't mean to make light of it or the efficacy of it in the slightest i think it's a you know it's a super interesting useful idea but i think the fact that you're looking for someone who's doing something different that someone's not doing like we wrote and you know we also at tech eu and this is partly to do with um because we do cover all of europe the uk ukraine a few outliers like moldova and um armenia um it's it's a big market and so if we if we were to just do features the the um the publication would be a little slim you know because it takes a while to do them um so we do funding rounds because we do this for a bunch of different reasons i mentioned this i'll go back to why I'm mentioning this in a sec, it really demonstrates where a market is going, where is the money going, and particularly if you're the one writing the stories or your colleagues writing the stories, you see where in health tech the money is going, and you could just say, oh AI, but it's like, no, no, it's a bit more than that, you know, it's more nuanced, and you also get to see trends, so within that, who are the investors, what are they investing in, what regions are really coming up in particular spaces.
29:10Like obviously the Nordics has always been a great health tech space because of the obvious companies that are present there, the larger companies that have their own investment arms, the CBCs. And also it's just, you know, like we get a lot of biotech, for example. So funding for drug discovery, a lot of funding for things like creating sort of cell-based therapies for the undruggable. It's quite common now. We get, there's a lot of tech targeting cancer. There's a lot around Alzheimer's, drug resistant depression. So a variety of different things where, you know, these are being funded. And it's good because you can look back over the last five years and go, oh, well, what happened to that company?
29:54You know, and I think the psychedelics is a good example of that because they are, and these kinds of companies in the biotech, it's long innovation cycles. so if you're if you've been a journalist a little while yeah follow that and see where it's going and you know it also gives the reader a feel of like you know what are the changes here and what what's going to happen the next few years are we going to get a bunch of um companies you know combining forces are we going to get different regulations like what what's it going to look like i know i've got to let you go very shortly and thank you so much for giving us the time that you have um i've got a couple of questions left the first the first one is you obviously cover a lot of europe you've mentioned loads of different geographies there and you cover you know cross sector through tech as well it's not just health tech how do you feel about europe versus the us in tech and particularly health tech with what you see with what you're pitched with you know what you're seeing in terms of growth and growth stories these exits even, like all of that sort of stuff.
30:58What's your feeling on Europe versus the US at the moment? Okay, probably the biggest trend I would say there's a huge movement at the moment around digital and data sovereignty, keeping things built in Europe for Europe. It doesn't mean to be very clear you can't scale to the US or if you're in a smaller region, like maybe you're in Poland or you're in Moldova, you can't start with the US as your first market. But it's also about recognising that there's a huge desire at the moment to divest away from US and Chinese big tech, basically, you know, that part of the data stack. Whether it's, you know, it's certainly not saying you can't use things, but it's about looking a little more critically and looking at, well, you know, what happens if someone removes access to that tech, for example?
31:50What does that mean for Europe? and Starlink is an example for example um you know if they Starlink there's larger parts sorry large areas of the world dependent on Starlink for internet connectivity what happens if that if um on a whim Elon Musk decides to recall that yes not great and you would have even in health tech a lot of critical um uh things that would need to would be inoperable during that time and so my final question would be based on that and everything else that we've talked about are you optimistic for the future of health tech you see a lot of human stories you see a lot of impact you write about a lot of impact stories and so i imagine that you're one of the more optimistic people although there are doomsday scenarios with particularly the ai side of things that we have talked about at length on here um and you know even very well respected people are putting ah you know existential crisis that wipes out humanity is probably about 20 likelihood at this point so yeah that's that's positive that's positive because 80 the likelihood was we're all going to be fired we do get a lot of this but in terms of a journalistic view on this based on what you write about and what you see although this is a lot of opinion um how do you feel okay um optimistic yes i'll also tell you one thing um my i have an i share an office in berlin with some writers a few doors down we have a cryogenic amazing startup i say that i don't know what they're betting on that's probably not so amazing they do humans and now pets as well wow wow and um they've also they they're also um they're all doctors they're not you know dodgy they're they're it's it is regulated um and they do also have one in in the us probably california may be wrong there um so there is that side of it where people don't know what is going to happen in the future but they want to bet on it just in case something better is going to happen that's a great answer the best bit um anecdotally one of the best bits is they have an ambulance that they use to collect the um the bodies pre or post frozen post-frozen where do they freeze you right switzerland yeah they have a little ambulance out the front that's branded oh my goodness you'll giggle a little bit when i see it so yeah so obviously there is a lot of people betting on the future um i am also positive because i think um the access that's been done in in genes yeah and cellular medicine and um Even things like reducing complexity in surgeries, different tooling.
34:34Meet a lot of companies working on tooling now, ex-surgeons that are looking at, you know, I need this tool when I'm doing brain surgery or something like that. Very interesting. There's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot happening. um it is really just that a lot of it probably is it doesn't get to your general person because all they hear about ai is um that you can use it instead of google and it's gonna take your job yeah you know i healthcare is probably one of the most optimistic reasons for ai particularly things like your drug drug discovery um and genetics i also agree uh one thing that i just do want to mention as well that i really appreciate about what you've written about recently is you wrote about ditto raising money which is a health tech company um and so whilst we can be very optimistic about the long arc which is the drug discovery the gene therapy the cell therapy all of all of that stuff we can be optimistic about that there's also a more nearer term about um simply patients understanding what happens in a consultation do you know what i mean like that for me i wrote about it in health tech pigeon like it just feels like basic basic patient accessibility of of just knowing knowing what happens you know what i was an event in in um saudi last year um longevity lifespan health kind of stuff and they were talking about um health education patient education and saying in the u.s they have to gear it to a fourth grade reading level interesting that's got to be very hard to execute in a way that you're explaining this incredibly complex um health needs particularly with people with dual um dual complexities at least i'm taking it seriously enough to put that policy down um it's quite shocking okay it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for giving us your time which i know is very valuable um for people that want to get i mean you hear from us all the time right um as an agency but you obviously like hearing from startups themselves.
36:34And I say this to people that don't have agencies. Journalists love to actually hear from you. Absolutely correct. So for those people. You can just, you don't need to pay someone. You can contact us. You can send me a message on LinkedIn. You can email me. My email is in my LinkedIn. You know, it is very doable. We are not scary people. This is our job. We are paid to talk to you. I love that. It's got to be novel. It's got to have impact, right? And those are you two. Perfect. Think about why would someone read it? That's your number one.
From the publisher
In this episode, James is joined by Cate Lawrence, Senior Journalist at Tech.eu, to explore what the European healthtech ecosystem actually looks like from the press box, how stories get chosen, what makes a startup worth covering, and why the data gap between innovation and clinical impact remains so wide. Cate brings a decade of cross-sector reporting to the conversation, from wearable tech and women's health data to Ukrainian healthtech and the growing push for European digital sovereignty.
Connect with Cate: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catelawrence1/
Learn more about Cate's work: https://tech.eu/authors/catelawrence
Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.com
Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.com
Get in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.com
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