Barcelona City Council, through Barcelona Activa, and Barcelona Health Hub (BHH), signed a collaboration agreement a few days ago to promote entrepreneurship and innovation in the digital health sector. The signing ceremony was carried out by Jaume Collboni, first deputy mayor for Economy, Labor, Competitiveness and Finance, and president of Barcelona Activa, and the president of BHH, Cristian Pascual.
Digital health, a strategic bet for the city
The agreement reaffirms Barcelona’s commitment to digital health as a strategic sector of the economy. This collaboration agreement aims to promote initiatives aimed at supporting entrepreneurship, innovation and business competitiveness, attracting and promoting talent and public-private partnerships in the digital health sector. The scope of action will focus on accompany the creation and growth of new companiesin promoting technology transfer to the sector and in promoting the creation and growth of scientific, technological and business talent to gain competitiveness.
The First Deputy Mayor for Economy, Labor, Competitiveness and Finance and President of Barcelona Activa, James Collbonihas highlighted that “Barcelona is a benchmark city in the field of science and technology, with top-level scientific facilities. This positioning responds to a strategy to diversify our production model, the BCN Green Deal, based on a structural commitment to talent, innovation and strategic sectors such as Health and Bio. It is within this framework that the alliance with the BHH is inscribed, which will surely generate new business initiatives with social return and the capacity to improve people’s lives”.
The president of Barcelona Health Hub, Christian Pascual, has stated that “The latest technological advances have emerged as solutions to many of the challenges facing the healthcare system. This has caused the emergence of Digital Health as a sector. In this revolution on a global scale, Barcelona has all the necessary ingredients to become a benchmark for innovation in Digital Health. This alliance that we are signing today encourages us to continue working so that Barcelona is a pole for attracting talent to build the health of the future”.
The challenge of turning the city into a global digital health center
The agreement also plans to activate the international promotion of Barcelonaas a world reference ecosystem in the digital health sector, as well as generating new alliances with international actors and new links with other cities or territories of excellence within this field. Including the BHH in the BCN Green Deal, the economic agenda of the city of Barcelona 2030 is another of the agreements signed.
The growth of the BHH will mean the need to have more spaces, and it is in this sense that the Barcelona City Council will study the possibility of expanding the physical headquarters of the BHH, preferably, in the same modernist area. Currently, BHH occupies 5,000 square meters of the halls of San Manuel, San Leopoldo and the Operations Center of the Sant Pau Modernist Enclosure, where 33 startups with a total of 184 workers are housed and also functions as a center of interaction between more than 350 members (startups, corporations, health institutions, universities and investors), with a presence on five continents.
