The team at Barcelona Health Hub was honored to have participated in this year’s 4YFN Digital Health and Wellness Summit, providing insights into health data and access to it, analytics, AI and digital health services, and product innovations.

BHH was proud to organize a series of panels on various digital health-related topics on the stage of BStartup. If you were unable to participate or want to revisit this discussion – we offer these videos along with a summary of the discussion.

On Monday, June 28th, we organized the BHH Strategy Panel. In this panel, we discussed why Barcelona Health Hub makes Barcelona a great candidate to become a digital health capital of the world and why it matters.

The panel was moderated by Cristian Pascual, CEO of Mediktor and President of Barcelona Health Hub, and counted on the participation of Carlos Parry Lafont, Government Affairs Head – Spain of AstraZeneca, Jordi Grau, Director of Projects and Information Systems of Fundació Privada Hospital Santa Creu I Sant Pau, and Luca Venza, Director of Technology Innovation, Transfer & Acceleration of the IESE Business School.

Introducing Barcelona Health Hub

Barcelona Health Hub is a non-profit organization devoted to foster innovation in digital health from Barcelona to the world. We have a clear objective: to promote Barcelona as one of the top innovation hubs in the world, and we have a strategy for that.

• BHH fosters the technological transfer of Barcelona’s digital health innovations showcased at conferences like 4YFN.
• BHH helps these startups apply these technologies to real-world applications around the world.
• BHH Identifies the challenges that these startups need to overcome and offers support to meet those needs.
• BHH promotes digital health knowledge – supporting healthcare providers who do not have a background in IT and data sciences – to ensure these innovations reach healthcare practices.
• BHH supports early staged entrepreneurs with the resources necessary to turn ideas into viable products and profitable businesses.
• BHH will partners with sister cities to create a worldwide network of digital health hubs to support healthcare innovations that deliver better care outcomes, drive efficiencies and reduce the cost of healthcare.

What is driving the acceleration in digital health?

Digitalization is quickly transforming healthcare as we know it. As a result, there is a real demand from patients, doctors, and nurses who all see a real need in their day-to-day life. In addition, hospitals, insurers, and public health care systems see these advancements as an opportunity to make health care more affordable.

We’ve seen this work in other sectors. We’ve seen this work in energy. We’ve seen this work in industry, and now it is working its way very aggressively into the healthcare sector.

Barcelona is poised to be a leader in Digital Health.

Barcelona has an ecosystem to support these digital innovations in healthcare. The ecosystem includes big hospitals, good universities, business schools, and a growing educated talent pool. Barcelona’s employment opportunities are some of the best in Spain and perhaps in the south of Europe.

Barcelona offers a superior quality of life for those interested in digital health. We have the weather. We have world-class institutions to support our talent, entrepreneurs, and startups. For example, Sant Pau Foundation is an institution with over 600 years of history supporting healthcare. This, coupled with Barcelona’s universities, medical schools, and nursing programs, provides a constant stream of talent to support its healthcare innovations.

Barcelona has an incredible network of hospitals that have a strong culture of innovation. When you layer on top of that the fact that Barcelona has world-class business schools and universities that are turning out strong technical skills, we’re able to piece together quite a strong ecosystem of talent.

In addition, Barcelona can leverage EIT Health, a European-wide initiative bringing together countries and providers. The Spanish EIT chapter is one of the most aggressive, based in Barcelona, and most of the startups that we have are coming out of the Catalan ecosystem.

BHH Strategy Panel at 4YFN