A little less than four years after StartUp Health launched a three-year academy in a collaboration with GE, it is expanding what has been a geographic-agnostic concept to Finland. StartUp Health Finland will be funded by Finpro as Team Finland Health — an agency that supports economic development and seeks to stimulate the growth of Finnish businesses internationally and foster direct foreign investment in Finland.
Underscoring StartUp Health’s relationship with GE, the headquarters for StartUp Health Finland will be GE’s Health Innovation Village in Helsinki where it will run a co-working space. Finpro will also hire a team to run the group, which will include regular coaching and mentoring in Finland and the U.S.
It will choose five Finnish digital health startups for StartUp Health Academy and has started searching for applicants.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
In a phone interview, StartUp Health Cofounder Unity Stoakes said he was excited about the expansion. He likened Finland to a petri dish for healthcare.
“It’s very progressive.” He pointed to the country’s network of biobanks for research (participation is voluntary). It’s also home to a talent base of a few thousand people with a mobile phone technology background thanks to Nokia.
He added: “We are starting to bring innovation from different parts of the world and mash it together. We’re moving beyond an incremental approach.”
The collaboration with a government-funded entity is also a milestone for StartUp Health. Although it has Academy participants from several countries, this development pushes things up a notch.
Eero Toivainen is a program director of Team Finland Health /Finpro said the program would give the country’s digital health entrepreneurs greater access to commercialization opportunities in the U.S. market through StartUp Health’s network. Although he declined to get into details StartUp Health Finland’s funding, Toivainen said the Finnish government allocates about $100 million to investment in small- and medium-sized companies in the life sciences and digital health space.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
He noted that in addition to Nokia, the company is home to a digital health industry that includes wearables from companies such as Suunto and Polar and sleep tracking business Beddit. It also has a gaming industry with companies behind Angry Birds (Rovio Entertainment) and Clash of Clans (Supercell).
