Europe must stop exporting its health innovations and start scaling them at home, this DLD Health expert panel discussion makes clear. Moderated by Stefan Drüssler (UnternehmerTUM), the session includes Marion Bayer-Schiller (HypoVereinsbank/UniCredit), Christian Teichmann (Hubert Burda Media), and Surjo R. Soekadar, Chief Innovation Officer at Charité Berlin.
Marion Bayer-Schiller calls healthcare “the most important strategic topic” for Europe. One of the biggest challenges is a persistent financing gap: “You have long R&D cycles and you have therefore also a regulatory risk and then unpredictable cash flows. That makes traditional financing difficult.” UniCredit aims to close this gap “with growth debt solutions”, she says, “to make the scalability from a financing perspective possible.”
Surjo R. Soekadar presents alarming figures from a WHO evaluation of 90,000 healthcare professionals in Europe: “30% said they have symptoms of clinical depression”, he notes. “And what was even worse was 10% were saying it would be better to be dead.”
Rather than waiting for policy reform, Soekadar announces the launch of a new innovation center at the Charité, Europe’s largest university hospital. The ambition: to transform the institution into what he calls “an innovation powerhouse” that combines patient care with economic value creation.
Christian Teichmann hopes that AI could become a game changer. “We sit on a lot of data”, he says, “and this is obviously our data. It will stay in Europe. And there’s a lot to be done with it.” However, Europe must learn to iterate fast and implement new solutions quickly. “Speed is of the essence”, Teichmann stresses.
Watch the video to explore this session in detail.
