PhD Position "Business Models for Healthy Longevity and Scalable Disease Prevention (m/w/d)
Your tasks
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
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
- 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
Your profile
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
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.
Inspirational Work Environment
Executive Education
Network
Family & Career
Equal Opportunities
Fit and Healthy
Inspirational Work Environment
At the HSG, as Europe's leading business university, we operate in an entrepreneurial environment where you will meet highly qualified, ambitious experts - both regionally and internationally. For example, you benefit from a modern IT infrastructure and, in our library via HSGswisscovery, from nationwide access to the wealth of scientific information available.
Executive Education
We support internal and external executive education opportunities. Our internal executive education programme offers you a practical, dedicated and didactically mature transfer of knowledge in the form of seminars, e-learning, coaching and collegial advice. We support task-specific external training and executive education financially as well as with regard to the time required.
Network
We promote our culture of cross-functional collaboration and create space for forging valuable relationships - also with external partners. Regular exchanges and internal events help to strengthen these relationships and make them long-lasting.
Family & Career
We provide our employees with flexible work time models with a variable number of hours per week. As a family-friendly employer, we offer part-time positions, 16 weeks of maternity leave and a subsidised crèche, as well as support with childcare during the vacations.
Equal Opportunities
The University enables equal opportunities for all employees and students. This applies to degree courses and work, as well as academic careers, university management positions and the reconciliation of studies, work and private commitments. We are committed to this with various measures in the areas of teaching, research, administration and the Presidency.
Fit and Healthy
We help you stay fit and healthy. In addition to our diverse range of sports activities at the university, most of which are free of charge, and campaign weeks for corporate health management, we also offer you fruit in the workplace. In our canteen you will find a wide selection of freshly prepared meals - from vegetarian to fish dishes - at discounted prices.
Further information on working at the HSG can be found here.
For job-related questions
Director, School of Medicine
We are looking forward to welcoming you to our team.
PostDoc/Academic Researcher CSS Health Lab
We look forward to meeting you.
Your place of work
University of St.Gallen
«A place where knowledge is created» - As one of Europe's leading universities of economics and business administration, the University of St.Gallen (HSG), Switzerland, is committed to the education of over 10'000 students. The HSG is one of the largest employers in the region and provides an attractive and innovative environment for more than 3'500 researchers, educators and professional staff.
