Care Forward

One of the enduring paradoxes of healthcare innovation in Europe is this: hundreds of healthtech startups have genuinely promising solutions, yet very few ever manage to get inside real hospitals and public health systems. The barriers are not purely technical — they are regulatory, cultural, and organizational. Care Forward was created to dismantle those barriers in a systematic way. The program, born from a collaboration between Doctolib, AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris, the largest hospital system in Europe), and Roche, functions as a structured bridge between the startup world and the reality of hospital operations. This is not a conventional accelerator: it embeds selected healthtech startups directly into clinical pathways, putting them in contact with doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients in live operational settings. The strength of the initiative lies in the caliber of its founding partners. Doctolib is Europe's leading medical booking platform, with tens of millions of registered patients and deep relationships with healthcare professionals across the continent. AP-HP operates 39 hospitals in and around Paris with over 100,000 employees. Roche is one of the world's top players in diagnostics and pharmaceuticals. Together, these three organizations cover nearly every dimension of the European healthcare ecosystem. For a healthtech startup, being selected by Care Forward means far more than adding a logo to a pitch deck. It means gaining access to real clinical data, validating a solution with actual patients, and building evidence of effectiveness that opens doors to public procurement contracts and healthcare reimbursement. This is precisely the kind of traction that investors look for — and that companies in this sector so often struggle to demonstrate. In an Europe where the digitalization of public healthcare moves at different speeds from country to country, Care Forward represents a public-private collaboration model that could prove replicable. The Paris-based program casts its eye across the entire European healthtech scene, positioning itself as a privileged gateway for those who want to transform healthcare from the inside.