Every year, new health innovation projects are launched from the TalTech Digital Health curriculum. During a six-month development phase, student teams focus on building a solution to a specific health problem. However, to grow their projects into real businesses, additional support is needed. Cooperation with the Health Founders business accelerator supports the next stages of the projects’ development process and helps to prepare the teams for their first investments.

TalTech Digital Health Master’s programme gives the students an opportunity to get a real-life experience of building a product or service from scratch. The students learn to manage a digital health innovation project and get to test their teamwork and leadership skills. In addition to the general study programme, the teams are required to pass a number of checkpoints and demonstrate the growth of their solutions. The most successful teams have the opportunity to continue in the Health Founders accelerator development program.

Besides boosting the development of student projects, the contract partners also focus on research cooperation. TalTech students and researchers contribute to health-related innovation activities of Ülemiste City, including the implementation of remote healthcare services and conducting  research studies that contribute to the product development process of the health technology companies in the area. “Our international master’s programme provides knowledge on how to create and actually implement digital health innovations. The cooperation agreement gives the students access to healthcare specialists and end users, who would support the validation of their innovative products or services, ”explains Priit Kruus, the programme manager of the Digital Health curriculum.

The cooperation agreement promotes the growth of knowledge-intensive business, bringing together students and companies from the healthcare field just at the right time. This gives the students a possibility to write a master’s thesis or publish a research article in a specific field. “For example, a master’s thesis can be a clinical study of a technology under development – this is how the first step is taken during the studies to show the evidence-based nature of the solution,” Kruus points out.

In the field of health technologies, in addition to tackling the usual growth difficulties, companies also need to face regulatory and clinical challenges. “With our accelerator, we help entrepreneurs to cope with all of this better. Cooperation with TalTech provides an opportunity to lead entrepreneurs to the right path during the early stages of company development,” said Erki Mölder, co-founder of the Health Founders accelerator. He added: “An idea is not a product, a product is not production, production is not sales and sales do not equal profit. In other words, there is a long way from an idea to actual profit, and companies developing health technologies need very different advice and support in these distinct sections. In cooperation with TalTech, we can offer this support to them. ”

TalTech Digital Health MSc is a unique master’s programme in Europe that provides interdisciplinary knowledge on digital technologies, innovation and change management of health care. It relies on the best practices of health care digital transformation and e-health innovations from Estonian e-health system and international successes.