Your PhD Project
Developing a Sustainable Business Model for Digital Disease Prevention in Switzerland
As a PhD student, you will lead and shape Subproject 5, which focuses on business model innovation for prevention. Your research will examine how digital precision prevention services can create value simultaneously for individuals, insurers, providers, public authorities, and society.

Key Research Focus

• Designing and evaluating business models for upstream disease prevention
• Aligning incentives across insurers, providers, public authorities, and digital health companies
• Integrating prevention into existing reimbursement, tariff, and policy frameworks
• Assessing economic viability, return on investment, and social impact

Translating prevention from pilot projects into scalable, long-term solutions

T2D prevention will be your core empirical context, while your theoretical contributions will be relevant across non-communicable diseases and healthy longevity initiatives.

Your Role and Responsibilities
You will be involved across the full project lifecycle:
Stakeholder Co-Creation and Field Research

• Work directly with Switzerland's largest health insurers
• Collaborate with cantonal health authorities, hospitals, and provider networks
• Conduct co-design workshops, expert interviews, focus groups, and surveys
• Coordinate interdisciplinary partners across academia, industry, and the public sector

Health Economics and Business Model Analysis

• Perform cost-benefit analyses, break-even calculations, and economic simulations
• Analyze insurer data, Swiss tariff systems (e.g. TarDoc), and prevention cost structures
• Evaluate value-based prevention and investment cases for insurers and public payers
• Study regulatory, reimbursement, and operational barriers to adoption

Implementation and Scale-Up

• Support pilot implementations of digital preventive interventions

Analyze engagement, outcome, and adoption data

• Co-develop policy guidance and an open-access business model toolkit for national scale-up
• Contribute to dissemination via policy webinars and practitioner-oriented outputs

Academic Output

• Publish in high-quality international journals in management, digital health, and health economics
• Present findings at leading academic and practitioner conferences
• Complete a cumulative or monographic PhD dissertation at HSG

We are looking for a highly motivated candidate with the ambition to shape the future of prevention-driven healthcare.
Required Qualifications

• Master's degree from a qualified university with a minimum grade of 5.0 (Swiss grading system)
• Excellent proficiency in German and English
• Strong interest in health economics, health technology assessment, and economic evaluation
• Ability to coordinate and communicate with diverse stakeholders, including senior decision-makers
• High intrinsic motivation to work on interdisciplinary, applied research with societal impact

Desired Background

• Business administration, management, economics, health economics, public policy, or related fields
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Interest in digital health, prevention, and healthy longevity