Digitalized Healthcare on a Global Scale: Live Case with heyPatient AG

Consumer demand with regards to digitalized healthcare is growing and the importance of digitized patient-oriented processes is evident. heyPatient AG aims at providing services that enable streamlined processes and seamless interaction between patients and doctors. During the design of the live-case assignments, Regula Spühler, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and co-founder of heyPatient, shared the story of the company. Their ethos is that people can concentrate on people because the necessary data is available and supporting processes are automated. According to their vision «People and their health are the focus» heyPatient AG developed a «mobile Health as a Service»-solution with an integrated patient app that serves as a digital health companion. The app organizes healthcare appointments and paperless admission, informs on treatment insights and preparation and keeps everything important always at hand, from insurance cards to documents.

Together with fellow students from Prague, our students were asked to strategically analyze selected regions within the EU, Southern Africa, Middle East, Asia and Northern America with the aim to identify high potential markets within the respective region. This included a thorough target market analysis of potential customers and end-users of their digital health service offering as well as considering global, regional and local competitors. In a second step, the students focused on market entry strategies, customer acquisition and the identification of feasible business models for the chosen markets. After four months of analysis and an intensive week of virtual collaboration, each group presented their final strategic recommendations to the representatives of heyPatient in January 2022.

Regula Spühler and representatives from heyPatient were deeply impressed with the findings, innovative ideas and creative recommendations. «We very much appreciate the thorough analyses and we enjoyed the exciting presentations and many surprising insights worked out by the student teams. On top of this, we got some valuable market insights from students originating from or living in these regions. It was not an easy assignment, considering that healthcare markets have their specialty in every region. We now look forward to follow-up on the recommendations and thank the students for their great work.»

The students enjoyed working on this interesting yet challenging project a lot and saw it as a valuable learning experience. Simon Hamod, final year BSc International Business student shared his view on this live-case experience, «Although a very intense project, the end result was priceless. We took away so many learning outcomes and it was great to be able to view the end result in conjunction with the work from our global strategic analysis as well as how this aligned to other student teams. I want to say a big thank you to my peers who participated in the assignment as well as our teachers Jacqueline and Marie for ensuring the smoothness of the virtual collaboration and for putting it all together.»