Pier Health, Barcelona’s new digital health hub
Barcelona Tech City, the startup Mediktor and Fundació Privada Sant Pau are opening a new digital health (#digitalhealth) hub in Barcelona next September. The initiative was presented on Wednesday 30th of May in the beautiful venue that will host the hub: Sant Pau Art Nouveau site, a stunning architectural site that was Sant Pau Hospital for 500 hundred years. Among the startups that have showed interest in the project are TopDoctors, Medtep, Psious or Iomed (winner of the EC2VC contest).
Sant Pau Art Noveau site was designed by Lluis Domènech i Montaner.
The hub will be called Pier Health and will be the house of digital health startups and big healthcare organisations -including pharma and insurers- that will support innovation activities. Pier Health will open in September with a space of 1,000 square meters and it has the potential to grow up to 10,000 square meters. Josep Carbó, Business Director at Mediktor, said that 10 startups have already pre-booked a space in the building.
Pier Health is the continuation of Pier 01, the city’s tech cluster located in Palau de Mar (in Barcelona’s Port Vell) that opened two years ago and now has run out of space. Pier Health and Pier 01 are driven by Barcelona Tech City, a private non-profit organisation open to all Barcelona-based members of the local and global technology ecosystem.
Entrepreneurs and companies working in Pier Health will benefit from the collaboration with Hospital Sant Pau, the Faculty of Medicine and Nursing (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and the research centres linked to this big health ecosystem. All this constitutes fertile ground for innovation and technology transfer to the global healthcare system.
Pier Health is now looking for partners to engage and support the project and startups to use the 155 spaces that are available for rental.