EIT Health, a network of best-in-class health innovators supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, decided four years ago to come towards the Romanian healthTech ecosystem by opening a call for a local hub at the beginning of 2018.

In the last four years, EIT Health has been a provider of networking and know-how, a supporter of Romanian healthTech startups and innovation projects, and a platform for collaboration. 

EIT Health provided the ecosystem with connection to the European healthcare ecosystem and to the level of activity and understanding that is present in other healthTech innovation centers around Europe like Barcelona, Budapest, Berlin or London. Since the beginning, EIT Health has been represented in Romania by FreshBlood HealthTech, a Cluj-based NGO that supports health innovation by connecting innovators to things that they need, providing feedback and mentoring.

Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation at FreshBlood HealthTech, the EIT Health RIS Hub for Romania, is convinced that EIT Health helped pushed the local ecosystem “to build the table” and to invite around it all the stakeholders, most of the universities, the doctors interested in healthcare innovation, the local authorities and companies.

“Evolution can only happen if everybody is contributing. I like a lot a quote, ‘collaboration moves with the speed of trust’, and we needed to grow our collaboration to increase the trust in each other and actually further develop our contribution in the ecosystem, if we want to actually use the resources that we have, and become more visible on the European and also on the international map.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation at FreshBlood HealthTech.

Results of the involvement of the EIT Health in the Romanian healthTech ecosystem

The results of the involvement of the EIT Health in the Romanian healthTech ecosystem began to be visible especially in the last two years, but the activity was intense all the last four years.

Between 2018-2019, the beneficiaries of the EIT Health programs were mostly individuals, students or young professionals that attended courses or participated in different programs.

From 2019, and especially in 2020, the local ecosystem got to the level where the Romanian startups began to apply at European level and began to be selected as beneficiaries of local innovation grants. 

In 2019, the Romanian startups had three winners from the twelve grants that were given, while in 2020 the local ecosystem received four grants from the total of fifteen grants that were given. There were also six startups that won different grants in different competitions from EIT Health in 2020. 

“While in 2020 we had a year of quantity, and I’m very happy to say that 2021 was a year of quality, as Romanian startups began to be among the winners of competitions. I would just like to mention here MyTully that not only entered in the InnoStars Awards, but won the first place of the competition, and also another startup from the Cluj-Napoca ecosystem, .lumen, which this year won the first European Innovation Council funding.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai.

Cluj-Napoca-based startup .lumen has received in 2021 a funding worth EUR 9,3 million in the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator. In 2020, .lumen was among the winners of the Headstart program of the EIT Health, winning 50,000 euros to develop the project.

“EIT Health and FreshBlood have been with us from day 0 of .lumen as a company (May 2020). We won support and a 50k EUR grant and we are continuing through their programs. Just a few days ago we became the first Romanian company to receive EIC funding. Even when applying to EIC, we’ve got support from EIT. We got very far, in a very short time, because of partners such as FreshBlood and EIT Health.”, says Cornel Amariei, CEO & Founder of .lumen.

EIT Health can also be considered among the most important investors in healthcare innovation in Romania through the grants it offered in 2020 and 2021. At the same time, it’s a way for the startups and for the innovators to raise their level and to compete at a higher level than they used before. 

A number of Romanian startups have international collaborations with partners from Europe which they got through the EIT Health Network, which is essential if they want to understand where they are, what they need to do to grow and at the end to transform their knowledge and motivation into actual results.

Impact of EIT Health within the Romanian ecosystem

As per Dr. Ion Petrovai observations, everybody that got connected with the EIT Health has improved their way of thinking and have now a much more applied approach to innovation.

A lot of researchers see innovation as a way to put their knowledge and their results into the market, but the approach of EIT Health is that you need to start with the problem, and not with the results of your research. The research results might be very valuable, however they need to be connected to a problem, which is the most effective way to approach innovation especially in healthcare. This approach is changing the mindsets from ‘I’m smart and you need to listen to me’ to ‘Let me better understand what you need, and I will try to help you‘.

Another observed impact of EIT Health and EIT is that it creates a mindset of collaboration. The EIT’s HEI Initiative helps higher education institutions build the capacity to teach innovation and entrepreneurship. One of the cross-section programs that was launched this year is encouraging universities to collaborate and to build an ecosystem, a mindset of innovation in their institutions.

EIT Health is requesting specifically not only to do just classes with students, but to create a vision and to be committed to that vision. Two of the biggest universities in Cluj-Napoca, Babes-Bolyai University and the Technical University are now part of the higher education innovation EIT programs. 

Besides the financing that EIT Health is bringing to the ecosystem it is also pushing the stakeholders to collaborate, requesting a different approach to the projects: focus on the problem and not on an idea, because an idea is only as good as it solves a problem.

EIT Health and FreshBlood next steps to develop the healthTech ecosystem

FreshBlood will dedicate the next few years to accelerate collaborations between startups, other stakeholders and funding, aiming to become self-sustainable.

FreshBlood is now planning to build in Cluj-Napoca a Health Tech Hub for startups that need to get their reality check faster and to get potential collaborators from the medical field, doctors but not only, nurses, pharmacists, healthcare administrators, healthcare organizations, both in the private and in the public sector. The hub is to be launched at the beginning of 2022.

Becoming self-sustainable is another key goal of FreshBlood for next year, meaning that the ecosystem will need to find resources within. If it sees healthcare innovation as relevant and a priority, the ecosystem will need to prove this by putting resources on the table, meaning people, financing and access to facilities.

“We believe that the other stakeholders, like the companies and the local administration, should come forward with resources that can be used for everybody’s benefit. As an example, the infusion that the grant from EIC to .lumen will bring in the ecosystem (9.3 million euro), will impact us all even though we had different roles in the winning of the prize. There will be things built in our ecosystem and used in from that financing and this is our larger target, to build something valuable enough in order to attract funding and interest.”, says Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai.

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In May 2019, Cluj-Napoca based FreshBlood, a community which aims to support health-related startups, has become connected to the European Connected Health Alliance (ECHAlliance), a European network of ecosystems, forming the regional network Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem, with the purpose of increasing the quality of the regional health services, through European collaboration and technology. Cluj-Napoca (often referred to simply as Cluj) is the unofficial capital of Transylvania, Romania and one of the most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities in Eastern Europe, a cultural center, an academic hub, and of one the most important innovation hubs of the country.

As part of the ECHAlliance, Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem will explore the opportunities and challenges faced by Transylvania in the medical field and will benefit from know-how through the international network of health and technology ecosystems. The Transylvanian ecosystem will work with other European ecosystems to implement innovative solutions that improve the quality of citizens’s health and well being by increasing the efficiency of the health system and creating new business opportunities.

I’ve talked with Dr. Ion-Gheorghe Petrovai, co-founder of FreshBlood and coordinator of the Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem about e-health and the Transylvanian ecosystem.

So what is Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem? What is its purpose? What do you want to achieve with this network?

Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem is an opportunity for people that are interested in healthcare, innovation, and in the improvement of healthcare, to get together, to collaborate, to build projects that can improve their businesses, and the healthcare in our region, taking benefit of the very strong technological advance that everybody is witnessing now in healthcare on a global level.

FreshBlood is the catalyst organization of the healthcare innovation ecosystem in Cluj, in Transylvania, and in Romania, and we want to be able to invent solutions which the hospitals in the US, in Europe or in Asia can use at one point in their medical practice. We want to be not only the ones that receive innovation, but also the ones that can build innovation and can share innovation all over the world.

“Our aim is to bring everybody around the same table, it will be a very big table”

The intention is to build on the collaboration that we have with the ECHAlliance, an organization which is strategically aligning together all the stakeholders of the healthcare system. We have in the middle the patients and the relatives of the patients, then the doctors, the hospitals, the companies, the universities, the local and central administration, the patient associations, the health care insurance house, etc. There are 12 stakeholders around the patients that can be involved in such a development, which any project will deal with when it is on its way to growth and impact.

Our aim is to bring everybody around the same table, it will be a very big table. First of all, we need to get aligned on the local page. And then, if we can grow projects on the local stage, with the help of ECHAlliance, we can bring these projects at European level. Also, some of the projects at the European level can be implemented in Transylvania.

Everybody is fighting for a limited amount of resources, and that’s one of the big drawbacks that we have, while actually to grow you need to be able to collaborate and need to be able to get access to much larger resources outside of your area. I like a lot a proverb which says: “if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go together”. Our principle is to go together in order to build something which is sustainable, and will continue to develop over time. It’s not a sprint, it is a marathon.

“In order to see the real impact, we will think in terms of 10 to 20 years”

In order to see the real impact, we will think in terms of 10 to 20 years, as we have seen how other ecosystems have developed. Silicon Valley is, for example, besides a very strong IT ecosystem, a very strong medical ecosystem, one quarter to one third of whatever is invented in healthcare is actually invented in California. We also had the chance to travel to Israel, which has an ecosystem started 20 – 25 years ago, and now we can see the global impact of Israeli medical startups. We have traveled to Nuremberg / Erlangen where is also a “medical valley” and a strong ecosystem of collaboration between different stakeholders, local administration, the university, the big companies, the small startups.

Our aim is to accelerate, because now we are much better technologically compared to where we were 20 years ago, where others were 20 years ago, and we can learn from the others. That’s one of the objectives of getting connected to the European level, to reduce the number of mistakes and be able to move faster. 

“Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem it’s a milestone for us, it’s a milestone for the region, and it’s a milestone for the country”

Getting connected to an organization which supports innovation and digital transformation, means taking some engagements towards being part of the organization, and there are also some actions that need to happen.

Being part of ECHAlliance, we have been able to engage people outside of FreshBlood, representatives of the universities and of the IT ecosystem in Cluj, and also representatives from Bucharest, which is a proof that what we do is valuable, and that those people wanted to be part of this kickoff.

Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem it’s a milestone for us, it’s a milestone for the region, and it’s a milestone for the people in Romania that want to see healthcare innovation developing. I won’t say we were the first but we were the first to put people together at the same table and on around the same topic, and we begun to build projects and partnerships with those people. 

We have now a number of actions, a number of projects ongoing, we just confirmed that everybody is connected and engaged, and our aim is to move even faster.

What’s happening now in Transylvania related to e-health?

We have witnessed in the last period an increased interest into e-health solutions and into e-health initiatives in Transylvania. For example, in the last three years, there has been an idea competition organized by the Medical University in Cluj, with prizes and with recognition of the best students and ideas that resulted, some of which became awarded startups, building their own teams.

“In the Innovation Labs 2019 Cluj, three of the five startups selected at regional level were healthcare startups”

What we have seen in the last years is that in the Innovation Labs local program, the healthcare startups have been a majority in terms of application and on the podium. Just during the last program, three of the five startups selected at regional level were healthcare startups. And this is something that we have seen coming from the students of different faculties and from the IT community. 

We have started to see an interest from smaller companies and larger companies to explore this medical field, as they see value and potential collaborations. There are many IT companies in Cluj that have healthcare projects, usually built for external customers. Some of the people that work on these projects begun to see potential problems to be solved in the local market, and they begin to come to us and say: “I’m interested to solve this problem. Let’s see what we can do”.

We are working with those people and companies through collaboration with the IT clusters in Cluj and this is extremely encouraging, people no longer ask for permission, they just begin to build something that they see relevant. Of course, this requires additional understanding of the market, additional connections and further evaluation, but the first seeds are already here. And we are quite pleased to see this happening. 

In terms of digitization there is also an interest from several hospitals in Cluj, as they start to see the value that such an initiative can bring. We had several meetings, through the Transylvania IT Cluster EHealth working group, with one of the hospitals, exploring the potential problems that technology could solve for their patients, for the doctors, and for the administration in general. The software systems at the hospital level have been built especially for reporting and they see more and more the need of using the data that they have and the technologies that they see in other fields of activity as a help to their work.

Universities have begun to get involved as well, at the Babes Bolyai University there is now under development a Center for Innovation in Healthcare, coordinated by Professor Razvan Chereches, which created the HIVE project, an innovation program with a focus on e-health.

Overall, in the last few years, I have seen more and more people starting to believe that we can build something relevant for the healthcare world. And I like one of the quotes of the mayor of Cluj, Mr. Emil Boc, which says that we should move from “made in Cluj” to “invented in Cluj”, which of course requires a different level of expertise and capabilities.

What are the strengths of the ecosystem?

E-health in Transylvania is first and foremost supported by the IT community. As pretty much everybody is aware, Cluj has strong technical capabilities. The nice surprise is that in many situations, we discuss with the IT guys and they are telling us they are working on projects which have a European, US or global impact, also in healthcare.

“Technology, good doctors, hospitals and universities, provide a very, very strong base to build”

Besides the technical knowledge, Cluj also has a number of dynamic doctors and good hospitals, and compared to the national level we have some of the most appreciated hospitals, according to some rankings.

And not the least, we have the universities, which are actually attracting talent from all over Romania, and even from all over Europe, as we have a lot of foreign students coming to study to Cluj.

So this would be our strengths: technology, good doctors and hospitals and good universities, a very, very strong base to build.

What are the biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge is collaboration. One of the mantras of developing healthcare innovation is that you need a multidisciplinary team. According to Stanford Biodesign, which one of the most structured ways to innovate in healthcare, as part of a team you need a medical person, a technical person, a business person and the user experience / design person, which makes total sense for an IT guy, but for the researchers, it makes very little sense because they just see the value in their research. So in order to build those teams, the best way is to build them when they’re you have something to share, which means an innovation project or even a startup.

“We see collaboration as the main challenge, main weakness and the main opportunity to build, and usually this requires external support”

The vision of FreshBlood is to foster collaboration between people that feel they need to get additional competencies. Like for example, you are a doctor and have an idea. You don’t know who to talk to. And you don’t know what is the business potential of your idea because, as a doctor, you don’t understand how the healthcare business works. Or you are an IT guy, you begin to be fed up by what you see in the, for example, the scheduling or the way that documents are managed in the hospital and you say: “I will do something about it”. You understand that you need to start something but you don’t know how the doctor is deciding, how the administrator is paying for the solution and what is the patient getting as a benefit. 

FreshBlood has been built as a platform of collaboration between those different people and entities, and we bring also investors looking for opportunities to invest in a solution that will have financial return and impact.

We see collaboration as the main challenge, the main weakness and the main opportunity to build and usually this requires external support. This is why we got connected with the ECHAlliance, and one and a half year ago to EIT Health, which has provided us the external reference to which we can link the universities, the IT companies, the local administration, the patient associations, and the startups. In healthcare, the needs are never ending, it’s a constant changing field. So the best way to be prepared is to be connected, and that’s the highest value that we can provide.

Which are the key players in the ecosystem?

We are quite optimistic about the involvement of universities, because in the last 6-12 months, I have seen an interest in the healthcare ecosystem within each university I’m talking to. And this is due to the fact that their students showed an interest and also some of the teachers there. So an opportunity to move beyond theoretical approach towards a more practical and more applied approach, which is extremely relevant and extremely powerful. Also, because everybody’s watching the universities as the reference points, then the IT companies begun to get involved, and the fact that you have IT companies supporting startups with know how and with development, it’s also very, very powerful.

“We are quite optimistic about the involvement of universities, and I also see the hospitals beginning to be interested, and willing to be connected”

I also see the hospitals beginning to be interested and willing to be connected, linked also with the local administration, which we want to involve too, since health care is one of the important priorities, human priorities. 

Which are the startups the most interesting to watch for the near future?

We have seen an increased number of startups, and each of the startups that were presented at the Innovation Labs are interesting to watch. There were five, and each team has the drive to move further.

WakeZ, focused on sleep management is a startup that has a very good team in their field, which is the most important. Wello, focused on family nutrition, is a startup coming with a more experienced and wider team, now in process of being rolled out.

Mira Rehab, focused on rehabilitation games, is the most impactful healthcare Cluj-based startup so far. They have been recognized by the National Health Service in the UK, which positioned and promoted Mira Rehab as one of their used innovations, which is I think, is a big recognition. They have also been able to do studies with their product in the UK.

Then at the national level, we see a strong evolution of Reflex, which is a Bluetooth connected physical recovery monitoring system, which is now in the clinical studies in Europe. And they are able to execute extremely well. And they are able to punch already at the international level. They went to competitions all over the world and they won prizes and recognition. And they are visible at this level, because their solution is performing as now in the rollout phase. 

We are extremely happy to see those startups and to provide them support and sharing experience with other startups. There are a lot of things and experiences that are very personal and very discouraging building a startup, so it’s very important that startups and founders learn one from another, maybe even more than they can learn from textbooks, from the internet or from experts.

Last question is about your vision for the future

Our vision, as we started three years ago, was first of all to be a community, meaning that we share resources, and we grow together, and our vision for the future is to become a structured pre acceleration program, as for the startups and for all people with innovative ideas that are at the beginning, it’s very important to understand what it’s expecting them, and we cand identify their first potential collaborators.

We now have a network of mentors and collaborating doctors, IT guys, and people with valuable healthcare business experience. We also have access through EIT Health to an European pool of mentors and to European startup programs. In the spring we had 19 programs for startups accesibile for any level, even just with an idea, and we had teams going through the whole process provided by EIT Health. There are also programs like Jumpstarter, two days working for an idea: you have a team of two people, you are going to evaluate an idea, and they will help you go through the process, and then you would have the opportunity to go into a boot camp for one or two weeks, or for example, HVLab in Budapest, which is four months. And then we have event competitions for startups for those that want to scale up at European level and the international leve.

In order to access the opportunities, it’s important to have a local pre-acceleration and support program, focused on the healthcare field that can run all year long, in which people can get connected and prepared in order to be able to grow. We see it important to have it as a program because what we see are mostly acceleration programs that are focused on the IT or the technological part.

In the autumn we are preparing another innovation program with focus on researchers and PhD’s that will help them give more value to their work. 

“Our vision is to become a dedicated healthcare focused innovation accelerator for Eastern Europe”

Sometime in the near future, we want to be able to build a startup accelerator focused on healthcare, which would have not only a Romanian footprint, but a dedicated healthcare innovation accelerator for Eastern Europe, because there are several ones well funded in Western Europe, but none with a big focus on healthcare in Eastern Europe.

In parallel we will to build the community and the connection with the stakeholders, as we see it vital for the ecosystem development. This is why we wanted to connect Transylvania Digital Health Ecosystem to ECHAlliance, and we are also helping the stakeholders or the institutions that want to implement healthcare innovation programs, to connect and to drive the impact of these programs.

We are also working on developing our collaboration with universities, and we foster collaboration between universities because, as I said, for a team to succeed, it’s important to have a multidisciplinary approach so we need to facilitate communication between technical students from the Technical University, business students from the Babes Bolyai University, medical students from the Medical University, helping them work together and keeping them on track in order to solve a healthcare problem.

The students that now test their mind and skills in a startup, will be doctors in 10 years or they will be professionals who will be able to have a more mature approach and they will be able to build their own teams. We are doing a lot of education, through the startup support programs and through the innovation support programs. 

Summing it up, it’s all about the people, the projects and the partnerships, a constant strife to improve healthcare, impacting our lives.

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