Eight eHealth Spanish startups visit the Nordic Countries and their extensive healthcare system 

“The program is a fantastic opportunity to understand the market and the culture and see how much this can be a market for us. For a small company like ours, it’s very difficult by your own resources to get such much information in such a little time,” says Daniel Fernández Mosquera, CEO of Qubio NeurocloudⓇ.

During the week in Copenhagen, him and colleagues from seven other Spanish companies met a wide range of representatives, from public authorities like the Danish Medicines Agency to Danish innovators such as Trifork.

“It’s an amazing opportunity for us here to learn about the ecosystem, about the companies, about the public administrations and learning about how to take advantage of this opportunity to achieve our goals and reaching agreements with local companies to go to the market here,” says Angel Diaz, CEO of the Ubikare, halfway through the DESAFIA immersion program for Spanish e-Health startups in Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

“We have access to people in Denmark that we probably wouldn’t have in Spain. The level of the people we are meeting – we haven’t got access to that level of people in Spain. So we are pretty happy, and I feel very lucky. I invite everybody to apply for the opportunity”, so says Angel Diez.

The visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, has been a tightly packed tour through the Danish healthcare and innovation landscape.

The largest hospital in Denmark, Rigshospitalet, has adopted “innovation” as a fourth core task, next to treatment, research and education. They have developed a pitching tool to make it easier for companies and start-ups to pitch innovative healthcare solutions to hospitals. A central message from its innovation department was: Be precise in your pitches and know exactly which department could use your product.

How to navigate a sometimes-convoluted way into Denmark’s expansive healthcare system was a topic for several weekly talks, not least at Nordic Health Lab, a Danish Non-Profit that matches companies and knowledge institutions with hospitals and municipalities so that companies can test and co-create their innovative solutions together with healthcare professionals. Here, the participants trained pitches, voicing their product’s unique value and relevance to test in Denmark.

He and his colleagues met Adam Wolf, CEO of the Danish Regions—the influential organization for the five Danish regions, the public entities that own and run the hospital system. They pitched their product yet again when they visited DTU—the Technical University of Denmark—and got tours at the DTU Skylab and DTU Science Park.

“We think that the Nordic countries and, especially Denmark, are an exciting market because of the conception they have of healthcare, which is based on a strong and solid public-private collaboration, and much focused on delivering value to the whole system, mainly to the patient, but also to the healthcare professionals, the physicians,” says Daniel Fernández Mosquera.

The Desafia Nordicos immersion program is funded and promoted by the Spanish public trade and investment entity ICEX and Red.es under the Ministry for Digital Transformation.

“The Danish Digital Health ecosystem was chosen because of the high relevance of Denmark in all the European rankings matching technological and innovative startups and digital health, and because of the added value proposal by NHG including Sweden and Finland in the program. So, this program becomes a real Desafia Nordic. We believe that this DESAFIA Nordic can push ahead our ICEX strategy in building more tech bridges between Spain and the Nordic,” says José María Blasco, Executive Director for Growth and Competitiveness with ICEX, who is responsible for the program DESAFIA at ICEX.

“We have been working hard in a digital health bridge for the last two years, organising inward delegations from Spain to Finland and Denmark, market reports on collaboration opportunities and much online info for the two ecosystems. We trust this DESAFIA Nordic for stronger cooperation between Spain and the Nordic in digital health.”

Nordic Healthcare Group has put together the program.

The participating Spanish companies in this 1st cohort are: Aritium, Dynamics VR, Inrobics, ORIGEN CORPORACIÓN BIOTECH, Qubio NeurocloudⓇ, Spika Tech S.L., UBIKARE ZAINKETAK SL and mSurgery

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