1.What is the approximate stakeholder breakdown of your ecosystem?
Connected Health – Estonian HealthTech Cluster – brings together 55 partners, including 30 companies (start-ups, health IT, medtech, biotech, and pharma), R&D partners (universities and technology competence centres), health and care service providers (hospitals, GPs, occupational health), patient organisations and user communities, and public sector, including ministries responsible for healthcare and entrepreneurship, Health Insurance Fund, and the National Institute for Health Development.
2. Who are the top 3 champions from your Ecosystem?
If we think in terms of SMEs that have recently managed to export their services outside of Estonia, it might be worth to mention Cognuse and TempID. CoNurse solution by the company Cognuse, now in use by the Kenya Red Cross, allows access to all workflows of nurses from smartphones by voice recognition and offers smart support to medical staff with limited experience. In the framework of the same project, the TempID smart thermometer allows to measure temperature from a distance was also taken in use in Kenya. In addition, one should also pay attention to the doings of Dermtest – a digital toolbox for skin and wound care that has now developed into a complete medical photo management software used by 55 hospitals and clinics. Dermtest digital tools have been implemented in 4 European countries and the value it has brought to the society is bigger than 15 million euros.
It is important to mention also a fourth champion of our ecosystem – Guardtime who has developed VaccineGuard. VaccineGuard is a digital platform that connects different participants in the vaccine ecosystem, including vaccine manufacturers, hospitals, public health authorities, certificate providers, wellness app providers, citizens, border guards, vaccination program managers, and insurance companies. By enabling these participants to share data and verify its authenticity across organizational boundaries and international borders, VaccineGuard enables real-time insights, pharmacovigilance, counterfeit detection and many other benefits enabling a faster and reliable pandemic response.
Download Guardtime´s VaccineGuard solution here
3. What EU funding/collaboration are you involved with, or you would like to be part of?
At the moment we are involved with 4 EU funded projects. Three of them are H2020 financed projects – Innovation Networks for Active and Healthy Ageing, UrbanTech and mHealthHub. Healthy Boost is funded by Interreg Baltic Sea Region.
4. What are the key priorities and themes for your ecosystem?
1. New services and products
By bringing together different stakeholders in healthcare (health tech startups, needs-based partners, i.e. hospitals and patient organisations, and IT companies) Connected Health Cluster aims to create new services and products that help to solve problems related to healthcare. The development of these services and products is successful if they can be tested both in Estonia and in foreign markets.
2. Internationalisation
In order for our health tech start-ups and SMEs to achieve recognition and market fit also abroad, Connected Health Cluster is devoted to joint marketing activities and participation in events which will increase the international visibility of both the Cluster in general as we all as our partners’ products and services and raise their export capacity.
3. Finances
We help our ecosystem partners in realising their innovative ideas by co-financing, offering information about relevant financial schemes, directing them to potential investments,or finding them a suitable accelerator program either in Estonia or abroad.
5. What is your primary strength as an ecosystem?
The primary strength of our ecosystem is the community behind it. Connected Health Cluster unites the most innovative enterprises and stakeholders who support each other and exchange experiences with one another. The connectedness of our ecosystem members is the key to successful joint development activities.
