Creating user-centric business opportunities in healthcare
We help organizations identify, develop and verify innovative business opportunities in (digital) health that create clear value for patients and healthcare professionals.
Our Offerings
Identify Opportunities
We uncover innovative (digital) health business opportunities – entirely new ones or as extension of existing products.
We combine a thorough understanding of the unmet needs and wants of patients and healthcare professionals with a sharp analysis of the competitive landscape, cutting edge technologies, and the shifting regulatory environment.
Why us
Our Expertise
We blend multiple forms of expertise in innovation, medicine, psychology, social sciences, and technology to a winning mix.
Driven by our scientific backgrounds, rigor and highest quality standards define our work.
Our Experience
We have extensive strategic consultancy, international project, and ample research experience, both in digital and non-digital healthcare settings.
We speak the language of patients, healthcare professionals and engineers.
Our Approach
We merge user-centric innovation, design thinking and business anthropology approaches to translate difficult problems into viable healthcare business solutions.
Our user-centric approach enables us to uncover the unmet needs of and complex dynamics between all the different players in the medical eco-system.
Our Network
We work within a European network of innovators, healthcare professionals, scholars, designers, regulatory affairs managers and patients, which offers us flexibility, agility and a diverse pool of talent.
Selected Cases
Opportunities for Digital Health Care Applications
Challenge: Our client, an in-vitro diagnostics provider, wished to explore opportunities for a digital health application (DiGA) that could get prescribed and reimbursed by statutory health insurances according to the at that time new German Digital Care Act (DVG). What type of DiGA would have the best chances to get through the approval process, get prescribed by doctors, and have a clear positive impact for patients?
Approach: We screened the current medical app market to look for underserved areas and interviewed physicians from different specialties to learn where they saw the biggest challenges and unmet needs. Accordingly, we narrowed down what type of patients with which conditions could benefit the most from digital support.
Outcome: From these learnings we developed and presented a small number of DiGA-concepts that we had identified as most promising to get regulatory approval, be supported by healthcare professionals and used by patients, and fit our client’s current business. The concepts aimed at helping patients better realize medical treatment recommendations and healthcare professionals getting more precise data.
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Empowering Patient-driven Innovation in Germany
Challenge: Many patients have expert knowledge on their disease and know the problems and pitfalls of everyday life. However, this expertise is rarely recorded and has hardly ever been used in the development of innovations in healthcare.
Approach: Together with the health innovation hub, a think tank set up by the German Federal Ministry of Health, we developed and set up a two-stage process to identify and publish unmet patient needs and further develop patient innovation in Germany.
Outcome: The health innovation hub has received 1,451 submissions to a “Call for unmet patient needs”. A jury selected the most promising concepts for digital health applications in late 2020 and together with the health innovation hub we supported the further development of those concepts on their way into the healthcare system.
Unsolved Challenges in Treatment Flows in Diabetes-related Eye Diseases
Challenge: The client wished to better understand diagnosis and treatment of diabetes-related eye diseases in the German market in order to get insights on how it might be improved.
Approach: We talked to a variety of healthcare professionals, payers, and diabetics to identify unmet medical needs and unsolved challenges regarding the overall patient experience, referral paths and treatment flows.
Outcome: Mapping the interwoven paths of the different players involved in treatment of the disease, their needs, goals and mindsets, we uncovered core challenges in the way the condition gets recognized, diagnosed and treated today, and where we see opportunities for improvements.
