For the first time, we welcome two guests to our podcast: Henrik Matthies and Julia Hagen from the Health Innovation Hub (hih) share their insights straight out of the ,digital forge' of Germany's Federal Ministry of Health. They stress the importance of an ecosystem approach and explain how COVID-19 may have a silver lining for the digitization of healthcare.

The tenth episode revolves around the digitization of mental healthcare. Our guest Nora Blum – founder and CEO of the German start-up Selfapy – illustrates that digital apps are a decisive tool in the treatment of mental diseases and increasingly help patients with depressions, eating disorders and other psychiatric illnesses to receive faster and more flexible medical care.

The ninth episode brings you ever closer to the future of healthcare with Thomas discussing the possibilities of digital biomarkers for modern medicine with Dan Vahdat, founder and CEO of Huma (formerly: Medopad). Together, they shed light on the prospect of diagnosing diseases in the earliest stages and how this contributes to a more preventative and personalized care for patients.

While COVID-19 makes it necessary for the healthcare system to increase use of digital means at the moment, this could also function as a digitization catalyst and create sustainable change. Dr. Johannes Wimmer, Germany's leading TV doctor, explains why this would be a positive outcome of the crisis in the podcast's eighth episode.

Together with Prof. Dr. Christiane Woopen, medical ethicist and Executive Director of ceres at the University of Cologne, Thomas discusses the implications of COVID-19 for basic human rights and that health is only one of our fundamental goods, whereas freedom is the highest good from an ethical perspective.

Peter Albiez, Chairman of the Management Board of Pfizer Germany, is our latest podcast guest with whom Thomas talked about his vision for healthcare to reward health rather than sickness. Listen now to learn what other opportunities health and life sciences offer to future competitiveness and progress.

The fifth episode brought Thomas to the United Arab Emirates where he met with Dr. Hamed Al Hashemi, Director for Strategy, Performance and Risk at the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi. Find out how the emirate plans to integrate new means of technology into its healthcare system by capitalizing the knowledge available and co-creating a vision for the future of health with all relevant stakeholders.

In the fourth episode Thomas and Dr. Georg Matheis, cardiac surgeon and one of Germany’s pioneering founders in healthcare, discuss how to regain the patient-physician relationship, megatrends in surgery, and the current situation of healthcare in Europe.

In the third episode, Teresa Graham, Head of Global Product Strategy at Roche Pharma, discusses the role big tech companies will play and how technology will change how patients access medicine in the future.

In the second episode of the Future of Health podcast series, Thomas discusses the changes data-driven biomedicine will bring to the healthcare sector with Prof. Dr. Torsten Schwede, Vice President for Research and professor for bioinformatics at University of Basel.