EIT HEALTH Lithuania

EIT Health – health innovation community, which covers a broad network of partners in Europe. It seeks to solve the most relevant challenges of healthcare by gathering the brightest minds and developing innovation. In Lithuania, EIT Health Hub is managed by Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and Lithuanian University of Health Sciences.

EIT Health Hub Lithuania has organized more than 30 initiatives, in which more than 2400 participants were involved. Since 2018. Initiatives has provided informational and financial support and mentorship for the start-ups and researchers in the field of healthcare, were serving as networking platform.

The spectrum of initiatives is broad:

Health Innovation Academy – each year is dedicated to analyse, comprehend and discuss one of the healthcare topics. Development of healthcare innovation was the focus of 2021, artificial intelligence in medicine – in 2020, rehabilitation in 2019.

Participants of Health innovation academy 2020

Health innovation academy 2021 activities

Hackathon Hospiton – a joint activity of KTU and LSMU, which brought +220 talents from different studies areas since 2018. During the first hackathon in 2019, around 20 innovative ideas were created in the rehabilitation area. In 2020 the topic of the hackathon was pharmacy and hackathon participants were developing digital health ideas on 2021.

Hospiton 2021 winners – team “Hello, dentist” creating an online platform for quick and easy registration with dentists and accessibility to dental data

Hospiton 2020 winners – team Medfast proposing to set up mobile medicines collection points

More than 40 innovative health solutions from Medtech, biotech, and digital health areas presented in Technorama innovation exhibition health care track. Visit 2021 and 2020 virtual Technorama exhibition.

Training and workshops program Smart-up Lab with the prize fund of 10k euros in 2018.

Participants, jury members and organisers of Smart-up Lab

“Morning health Talks” – networking and breakfast meetings of Lithuania healthcare innovation ecosystem leaders organised couple times per year. Meetings are aimed at to establish and strengthen relationships between the local stakeholders and EIT Health.

Panel discussion “Strengthening innovation ecosystem -what can we do now?” during “Morning Health Talks: Ecosystem development – key to success of health industry” on December 2021

Lithuanian EIT Health InnoStars success stories

Oxipit team, developing technology to optimize the process of lung X-ray analysis and imaging won the main € 25,000 cash prize for the development of their idea in 2018. Official webpage of the company.
BrachyDose team developing product dedicated to reduce the cost of cancer treatment, facilitate the cancer treatment process, ensuring the best results in radiotherapy has won € 25,000 in funding in 2019. Official webpage of the company.
Startup Ligence has won InnoStars Awards title of winner and € 50,000 in funding in 2020. Ligence is developing AI-driven fully automated echocardiography solution. Official webpage of the company. At the end of the 2021 year, the start-up Ligence received 2.5 million euros grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC). In addition, almost 2 million euro investment will reach the startup from the European Investment Fund (EIF).
Startup Emplastrum together with partners were granted €75,000 funding in RIS Innovation Call 2020 programme. Emplastrum ir developing flexible patches with integrated UVB LEDs that can facilitate the treatment of psoriasis. Official webpage of the company.

The InnoStars cluster is one of the seven geographical areas of EIT Health. It covers half of Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Portugal, as well as additional regions included in the EIT Regional Innovation Scheme– the Baltic States, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Greece and Romania. This is a group of countries qualified by the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) as moderate innovators. InnoStars is focused on promoting entrepreneurship, innovation and education in the domain of healthcare, healthy living and active ageing in the region and closing the gap between regions that are leaders in innovation and those regions which are progressing.