Design for a Program of Translational Medicine at the University of Tartu

This thesis report describes the design of a Translational Medicine program at the University of Tartu, developed in collaboration with the TeamPerMed Center for Personalised Medicine. The project addresses a gap in Estonia's healthcare innovation landscape: while talented doctors and scientists exist, their knowledge and findings rarely translate into products that reach the patient.

Through a research through design process, including semi-structured interviews, co-design sessions with stakeholders using premortem evaluation, and iterative prototyping, the work identifies doctors and scientists in healthcare fields as the primary target audience and establishes care, judo, and modularity as core design principles.

The resulting program is structured around the first two maturity levels of the CIMIT EIT Digital Health Milestones Framework — a framework for healthcare innovation that defines deliverables across clinical, market/business, regulatory, and technology domains — with a repeating product development cycle as its central explicit learning method.

Validation through expert feedback, a survey of the target audience, and individual testing interviews confirms the program's appeal and highlights the strength of its modular structure, which allows adaptation from a short workshop to a semester-long course. The final design is a program concept that teaches a careful and structured approach to healthcare innovation as an alternative to the fast-paced innovation culture currently dominating healthcare product development.