Ida Meier

Background

The digitalization of healthcare holds significant promise: reduced costs, improved access, and more personalized care at scale (Weimar et al. 2025). Yet despite rapid technological advances, the health sector remains a complex and heavily regulated industry, characterized by fragmented stakeholder landscapes, heterogeneous funding structures, and high barriers to commercialization (Weimar et al. 2025). These structural conditions create a fundamental tension: organizations that develop clinically effective digital health programs often struggle to translate them into sustainable market offerings.

This is particularly evident in digital prevention, as prevention programs for healthy individuals, unlike therapeutics or diagnostics, cannot rely on established reimbursement pathways such as the DiGA framework or selective insurer contracts; instead, they face a fragmented funding landscape and slower digital adoption. However, these challenges also create opportunities. Prevention programs can incorporate telemedicine, hybrid care, and scalable group-based formats and are less constrained than therapeutic interventions. This positions digital prevention as both a promising area for improving public health and a commercially attractive yet still underdeveloped market.

ZTM (Center for Telemedicine Bad Kissingen), one of Germany's leading institutions at the intersection of clinical research and digital health innovation, is actively developing a growing portfolio of such programs, targeting patients directly, health insurers, and hospitals as distribution partners. Despite promising clinical results, commercialization remains challenging: sustainable models must address questions of reimbursement, target groups, willingness to pay, and the scalability of digital components such as AI coaching, therapist support, and hybrid delivery formats.

Recent research has taken first steps toward structuring this landscape. Weimar et al. (2025) offer a systematic analysis, mapping digital health business models across 169 EU companies into a taxonomy of 11 dimensions and six recurring archetypes. Yet their work focuses on the broader and international digital health market and leaves the specific domain of prevention largely untouched.

Research Goal

Based on both service business model literature, as for example from our course Digital Services: Business Models & Innovation, and healthcare specifics (Weimar et al. 2025), the thesis targets two interconnected objectives. First, it develops a framework for business model design in digital prevention, synthesizing theoretical foundations with the specific regulatory, financial, and service delivery characteristics of this domain. Second, it applies this framework to concrete ZTM use cases, evaluating its practical utility and generating actionable recommendations for commercialization. To achieve this, the thesis pursues the following research objectives:

1. Synthesize the theoretical foundation: Conduct a systematic literature review integrating service business model theory with healthcare-specific findings to identify key dimensions for business model design in digital prevention, including funding pathways, cost structures, delivery formats, and regulatory constraints.

2. Conduct expert interviews: Conduct semi-structured expert interviews with practitioners from health insurers, clinics, and digital health companies to gather practical insights on which business model configurations work under which conditions, for which target groups, and at what cost.

3. Develop a decision framework: Triangulate findings from the literature review and expert interviews to develop a domain-specific taxonomy and decision framework for business model design in digital prevention.

4. Evaluate through ZTM use cases: Apply the resulting framework to concrete ZTM use cases to assess its practical utility and derive actionable recommendations for commercialization.

Your Profile

• You are interested in topics such as digital health, business models, and the German healthcare system
• You are highly motivated to work on recent real-world problems in a self-organized and goal-oriented working mode, and you bring in your own ideas
• You are open-minded and willing to get in touch with professionals, e.g., through an interview study
• You have prior knowledge of service business model concepts, e.g., through the Digital Services: Business Models & Innovation course (not mandatory)
• Very good English skills as the thesis will be written in English

How to Apply

We offer you a challenging research topic, close supervision, and the opportunity to develop practical as well as theoretical skills. If you are interested, please send a current transcript of records, a short CV, and a brief motivation (2-3 sentences) to Ida Meier: ida.meier@kit.edu

References

Weimar, S. N., Martjan, R. S. & Terzidis, O. (2025): Business Venturing in Regulated Markets – Taxonomy and Archetypes of Digital Health Business Models in the EU. Journal of Medical Internet Research.