#22 Health funding revival? 🙌

Also: Plummeting physician pay, social media minefields & steamy funerals.

Jun 6, 2023

Top of the morning to you. Today’s newsletter is 500 words-long, or a 2-minute read.

Think about it 💡

💸 In Q1'23, global digital health funding held steady at $3.4B, ending its freefall. Care delivery and navigation tech companies stole the show, scoring the most funding and deals. The US snagged 68% of the global funding, despite only clinching 51% of the deals. Mega-round funding plummeted to a measly $0.6B across three deals, while M&A exits more than doubled QoQ, mostly thanks to some wild US exits.

📉 Average physician pay fell by 2.4% from 2021 to 2022. Physicians are feeling the squeeze, and it's not just from their stethoscopes. With inflation putting a tight grip on doctors' real income, they're experiencing the pinch like the rest of us. It's a tough pill to swallow (sorry, had to), especially when docs are already grappling with shortages, work-related burnout, and endless paperwork. To add insult to injury (oops), Medicare also kicked in with a 2% payment reduction. Not fun.

Social media minefields 💥

👨‍⚕️ Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warns: social media is a dangerous playground for children and teenagers. Exposure to violence, sexual content, hate-based messages, disordered eating, bullying, and self-harming behaviours takes a toll on their mental health.

🔎 Research consistently links social media exposure to poor mental health in children. In this context, Dr. Murthy urges tech companies to prioritize privacy standards and design platforms with health in mind. Likewise, policymakers should enforce age restrictions and establish higher data privacy standards.

📓 This advisory aligns with the American Psychological Association's guidelines and CDC's data on worsening mental health among adolescents and aims to safeguard young individuals in an increasingly digital world.

Neat News 🗞️

🇩🇪 German scaleup Patient21 raised a €100 million Series C round, the largest yet for a European healthcare platform in 2023. Neat.
🦠 Scientists discovered a new superbug-killing antibiotic using AI. Super neat.
💰 Health optimisation platform Lifeforce, co-founded by Tony Robbins and backed by Serena Williams, secured $12 million to accelerate growth. Ultra neat.

Clean Content 🧼

🎙️ Tradeoffs delves into the highly topical issue of eliminating racial bias in healthcare AI.
💸 Here are the decks that hot healthcare startups used to raise millions from top VCs.
✒️ We wrote a blog post about how clinicians are using AI medical scribes. Here's a sneak peek:

This is what you came for 🍑

⚱️ In the realm of condom-carrying, there are some unexpected destinations. Turns out, funerals are no exception. Trojan's new survey uncovered that 1 in 8 men under 35 come prepared for the afterlife, just in case the mourning process turns unexpectedly steamy. Life (and death) has a way of surprising us in the most peculiar places.

Have a terrific one,