From prototype to care: the HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint as a growth driver for digital health start-ups

4 min read

The HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint offers digital health start-ups a structured path from concept via a Sandbox with clinical data through to the HIP ecosystem – including the chance to win up to 20,000 euros in prize money, visibility and joint market access.

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Better decisions, more efficient processes, noticeable relief in everyday clinical practice – many digital health start-ups develop convincing solutions. Nevertheless, numerous projects get stuck at the pilot stage. Often the problem is not the technology itself, but integration, data access and limited resources.

The HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint addresses precisely this point: it provides a structured framework for thinking interoperably, sharpening concepts along real clinical challenges and, upon success, proceeding step by step – from the concept phase via the Sandbox through to potential inclusion in the HIP ecosystem.

When good ideas get stuck at the integration stage

The path from the first demo to deployment in a hospital is rocky. Access to real-world care data is difficult, hospital IT landscapes have grown organically and are heterogeneous, and every new interface costs time and money. For a start-up, this means: individual PoCs with high integration effort that are barely reusable – and thus little planning certainty for further development.

Thinking interoperably – from the outset

Those who commit to interoperability early on reduce precisely these hurdles. Standards such as FHIR and openEHR are more than mere technical details. They help determine whether a solution can be transferred to different institutions and IT environments without starting from scratch with every integration. For start-ups, this is a lever to bundle development effort and build scalable business models.

The HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint as an integration lab

The HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint is aimed at start-ups that want to think about their solution interoperably and further develop it in a realistic environment. The first step is the concept phase: start-ups describe how their application can be deployed in one or more of the predefined clinical challenges, what professional added value it delivers in these care scenarios and how it fits into a FHIR- and openEHR-based target architecture.

If the concept is convincing, the teams gain access to a Sandbox environment with structured clinical data. There they further develop their integration under realistic conditions, implement interfaces and data flows in concrete terms and make technical requirements visible at an early stage. The integration logic developed remains usable and creates a robust foundation for further pilots and development steps.

From the Sprint into the HIP ecosystem

Successful solutions are accepted as partners into the HIP ecosystem – including the chance to win prize money of up to 20,000 euros. For them this means: visibility with clinics and relevant decision-makers, joint market access and the further development of their solution in a standards-based, scalable environment. Integration thus becomes not a one-off hurdle but the entry point into a growing interoperable ecosystem.

Conclusion: the next step for digital health start-ups

The HIP Digital Health Innovation Sprint supports start-ups in developing their applications not only in a professionally convincing way, but also making them connectable to real care structures from the very beginning. Those who think about interoperability, integration and clinical relevance together early on create the foundation for turning a good prototype into a solution with a genuine care perspective.

Participate now

All information about the Sprint and how to participate can be found here:

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Frequently asked questions

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