{"id":148483,"date":"2022-08-30T13:02:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-30T10:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/ain-aaviksoo-health-tech-is-booming-right-now\/"},"modified":"2022-08-30T13:02:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T10:02:52","slug":"ain-aaviksoo-health-tech-is-booming-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/ain-aaviksoo-health-tech-is-booming-right-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Ain Aaviksoo: Health tech is booming right now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"lead\">Piret Hirv, the Manager of the Connected Health Cluster, and Ain Aaviksoo, the Chief Development and Partnership Officer at HeBA, took the stage on sTARTUp Day to discuss the key points in building a health tech start-up. Here are some thoughts from that conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Ain Aaviksoo has had several roles in health tech \u2013 a doctor, a public servant, an internationally active consultant, an employee in a cybersecurity company and now a start-up founder \u2013 and he says that each role has taught him something valuable which is actually universal. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHealth technology innovation requires different perspectives to be successful. If you have all of them aligned for your cause (doesn\u2019t matter if you try to build a unicorn, or you\u2019re trying to establish the most successful health tech incubation environment in a country). If you have all stakeholders sharing the same vision, it\u2019s the ideal, but you need at least two or three to get anywhere (e.g. an engineer must have some health-savvy partner because it is not sufficient to have entrepreneurs incubating world-changing ideas, if there are no healthcare providers in the room).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn order to be a successful health tech start-up, you must be focused on the problem you are addressing and then, at least in the beginning, be ready to fix only part of the problem, because too disruptive solutions will be rejected, until you give time for the system around your focus area to adapt. Hopefully, you\u2019ll have patient investors who understand that the gains will be slow and not always under your or even you immediate customer\u2019s control.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn all domains, most of the innovation is incremental and only some of it can be disruptive. Angels and VC-s are always looking for the next globally dominant tech solution to invest in. In healthcare, the market is huge \u2013 a 10 trillion dollar market worldwide \u2013 that even seemingly incremental innovation can pay off in monetary terms. For example, if a new cancer drugs can improve the life expectancy of a patient by 2 months, it is a plausible candidate for sales in hundreds of millions, if not billions in total. And since the barriers to market are relatively high, it also means that once you are in the game (for example approved by the health insurance), then your revenue is potentially quite stable. Experienced investors in health space know that one has to be patient.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe good news is that all aspects of healthcare are potentially highly disruptable by health tech and medtech. Just that it cannot happen all at the same time, which means that not ALL great medtech ideas can possibly succeed in within the same timeframe and it\u2019s almost impossible to predict which of them will have an impact so big that some other \u201csolutions\u201d that are relevant within current state of the art will become obsolete or just cannot be absorbed at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is not possible to build successful health solutions if you cannot play with the health ecosystem participants (doctors, providers, insurances, regulators, existing tech providers like pharma) and at least to some extent by their rules.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA message to the public bodies \u2013 if you want health-tech to thrive in Estonia and provide Estonian people early access to world-class innovation, you MUST take more risk with the support of public money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA comforting message to start-ups is that in many developed, but even in less developed countries, smart governments have realised the value of health and life sciences\u2019 industry to the whole economy. This means \u2013 go quickly with your solutions where there are favourable conditions. It\u2019s not worthwhile to try to \u201cpilot close to home\u201d for too long, if the health ecosystem is not capable of rewarding your efforts \u2013 the world is open and good health tech is and should be efficiently localised where there is hunger for better solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo sum it up \u2013 health tech is booming right now. Incubating ideas is possible everywhere \u2013 growing them to companies requires an international approach from day 1: both in terms of team and markets. Incubators, clusters, access to universities, access to high quality specialists in various technical skills and smart public money are important success factors to seek, in addition to the start-up\u2019s own world-class capabilities (which do not differ in health tech from other sectors).\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo: Mana Kaasik \/ sTARTUp Day<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Piret Hirv, the Manager of the Connected Health Cluster, and Ain Aaviksoo, the Chief Development and Partnership Officer at HeBA, took the stage on sTARTUp Day to discuss the key points in building a health tech start-up. Here are some thoughts from that conversation. Ain Aaviksoo has had several roles in health tech \u2013 a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":147901,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tehnopol.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}