July's Complementary Healthcare Industry Insights
Women's health apps data concerns, Circe Studio and mentoring programme.
At Circe Health, we bring you modern business tools tailored to holistic healthcare practitioners who are looking for practice growth & sustainable success, so you can focus on the important work that you do.
What we do: sign up to join our booking platform to be matched with new clients here. Looking for help to (re)design your website? Book an intro call with me to discuss options, from low-cost templates to custom design. Or if you want to give yourself the gift of strategy and clarity for 2025, this online workshop will help with just that. And follow us on Instagram for more helpful tips and guidance.
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Circe Studio’s Summer Special: Website Reviews
Summer offers most of us some more quiet time, so it’s a perfect season to take stock of all aspects of your practice. If you’re looking to update or refresh your website but don’t have the time, energy or headspace to do it yourself - I’ve opened up my calendar to work with 10 practitioners on their website redesign projects this summer, with 8 spots still left. Website building is business building, and in today’s online culture a strong website is key for a successful practice.
We launched Circe Studio last month bringing you website design support tailored to the holistic healthcare space, and this summer I’m adding the option of website redesign to our collection. This is for you if you have an existing Squarespace website and are in need of a website design expert to refresh your website, from design, positioning, content, to SEO. Simply reply to this email and we’ll discuss what it is that you need and how I can help! You can also still book a 45-min website review call to get actionable feedback on website, which you can implement yourself.
Others described Circe Studio as: “an utterly brilliant service”, “a breath of fresh air”, “couldn’t recommend more highly” and “warm, friendly and encouraging”.
Events and Programmes
The Transitioning into Integrative and Functional Medicine Practice Group Mentoring Programme by Dr Sally Moorcroft at NCIFM starts in September. This is for newly trained functional and integrative medicine doctors, nutritional therapists, medical students, herbalists, and any other health professionals looking and able to practice functional and integrative medicine.
Building the Future of Functional Medicine Conference organised by the British Network for Functional Medicine, takes place on 28th September.
Market News
Privacy concerns related to women’s health apps
“With millions of users globally, the women’s health app market is projected to cross $18 billion by 2031. Yet these apps are among the least trusted. They collect data about users’ menstrual cycles, sex lives and pregnancy status, as well as information such as phone numbers and email addresses. In recent years, some of these apps have come under scrutiny for privacy violations. A number of problematic practices persist, researchers reported in May at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Honolulu.
The team evaluated the privacy policies and data management features of 20 of the most popular female health apps on the U.S. and U.K. Google Play Store. They found instances of covertly gathering sensitive user data, inconsistencies across privacy policies and privacy-related app features, flawed data deletion mechanisms and more.
The researchers also found that apps often linked user data to their web searches or browsing, putting the user’s anonymity at risk. Some apps required a user to indicate whether they had had a miscarriage or abortion to use a data-deletion feature. This is an example of dark patterns, or manipulating a user to give out private information, the study authors point out.”
“The WHO aims to release a new 10-year T&CM strategy in 2025. The aim of this paper is to describe the status of academic medicine, the integration of T&CM and the role of integrative medicine (IM) in this process, identify remaining challenges related to the objectives of the 2014–2023 WHO strategy document, from the perspective of four academic consortia for integrative medicine, including the establishment of a global matrix of academic consortia for IM and contribute to the future WHO strategy (2025).”
YouTube Launches Health Creator Community
“This community is dedicated to supporting all health organisations & healthcare professionals to grow their YouTube channels.”