Submit your request to get help and move your project forward.

H4 services The support process

Success, excess

At the end of 2024, the H4 has already exceeded the limit of projects it can process annually.

We therefore invite you to consult this page at the beginning of 2025 in order to submit your project to us.

Thank you for your understanding!

H4 services

H4 supports those with an idea or project, from the individual to the company, and helps them to take a significant step in their project.

 
It provides tailored support with:

  • Assessments, validations, and practical tests, in realistic, real, secure, and supervised situations
  • Analyses to guide the actions needed to develop the project
  • Easy access to users, healthcare institutions, caregivers, or patients
  • Specific knowledge of the healthcare environment or innovation processes
  • Funding support, only to cover an experimental study 

 

The idea or project must involve:

  • The creation of an innovative product or service in healthcare
  • An innovation with a technological contribution, or an organisational or process change
  • Long-term economic benefits in the Canton de Vaud (business model, optimization of practices, company or job creation, …)

 

PLEASE NOTE that the following are not supported:

  • Purely academic, research, and teaching projects 
  • Trade and commercial promotion activities
  • Requests for Vouchers which would be paid directly to the project owner or to the company

 

Want to apply for support?

Throughout the year, it is normally very simple. All you have to do is fill out a form available on this platform.
The request is then analyzed and assistance can be provided through the steps described below.

However, at the end of 2024, the H4 has already exceeded the limit of projects it can process annually. We therefore invite you to consult this page at the beginning of 2025 in order to submit your project to us. Thank you for your understanding!

The 3-step support process

   Admission

Request for support and preanalyssis

Any project owner can submit a support request on this site, in French or English, with the dedicated form. The following 3-step process is offered. The request is pre-analyzed. H4 follows up on it, depending on its alignment with its missions and its capacity to process it. The pre-analysis is then communicated by email to the owners to inform them of the planned actions and justify them. If the request is accepted, constructive questions are asked to the owners in order to encourage reflection. Then the owners are invited to present their project to the H4 team and to determine with them the next possible steps within the framework of H4. The process involves analyzing the real needs of the project by determining the gap between the current stage of the project and the targeted later stage. This step has value in itself: it provides a vision of the objectives in terms of risks to be avoided, taking into account the specificities of the world of healthcare being addressed; the owners can stop there.

    Orientation

Needs analysis and advice

In case H4 and the owners decide to go beyond the pre-analysis stage, aspects such as market needs, identification of all stakeholders with their needs, potential objections or motivations, the level of knowledge of the market and of the healthcare domain by the holder, the technical and organizational feasibility, or the business model, are explored by different means. H4 helps to more precisely determine critical assumptions and advises on how to verify them. To carry out this analysis, experts from the H4 Community can intervene: the project owners can present their project to the Support Committee who will give them feedback and can offer help; a bibliographic search in the scientific literature can be realized; selected experts (such as CHO, CMO, CTO, CFO, investors, managers – health professionals including all professions, such as physiotherapists, nurses, doctors, etc.) are often consulted.

    Interventions

Determining the experiments

Taking into account all the advices and feedbacks and all the previous analyses, the H4 and the owners can specify the field validations to be carried out, real “hands-on” experiments appropriate for verifying critical hypotheses in the targeted environment and with the type of healthcare professionals to be involved. This type of experimentation varies from focus groups with caregivers, field visits, or user interviews, to prototype testing, pilot deployment, or preliminary studies. A simple intervention can be carried out by interviews with the experts mentioned in step 2 (such as CHO, CMO, CTO, CFO, etc.). A roadmap of these experiments is established, with partnerships, recruitment of participants, and budget. The phase of experimentation itself can be financed by an H4 Voucher (sometimes covered by an H4 partner); granting is considered if it proves difficult to obtain funding from another source; the amount of the Voucher is between CHF 2,000 and 6,000. H4 also analyzes the possibilities of financing the project from external sources, such as Innosuisse, foundations, competitions, FIT grants, etc.

The experiment is carried out with the appropriate stakeholders. Often members of the H4 remain involved as project managers or experts, but not necessarily.

Process map