We are looking forward to welcoming you to our team.

We look forward to meeting you.

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

We are more than happy to offer a fully funded PhD Position (100%, 3.5 years) at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) on Business Models for Healthy Longevity and Scalable Disease Prevention with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) Prevention as a use case. This PhD position in Management (Business Innovation) is offered within the new Innosuisse Flagship project Swiss Precision Digital Therapeutics for the Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes. The successful candidate focuses on one of the most critical questions in modern healthcare systems: How can disease prevention be made economically viable, scalable, and socially beneficial?

While T2D prevention serves as the primary empirical case, the research addresses a broader challenge: developing sustainable business models for digital prevention and healthy longevity within the Swiss healthcare system.