digital-business-models-in-healthcare-book-matthias-puls.png

Tobias Silberzahn

National Digital Health Ecosystems – Concept, Benefits and Case Studies

Across countries, digital health has delivered promising results—but mostly in fragments. Studies show meaningful benefits, yet impact stalls when tools live as isolated point solutions, disconnected from records, standards, and scale. National, open ecosystems change the equation by setting shared rules, enabling interoperability, and aligning public and private actors around patient pathways.

Pre-order the book

Digital health tools must be more than just point solutions.

When Health Systems Think in Platforms:
From Pilots to Population Impact

Healthcare innovation fails most often in the space between research and clinical adoption—where publication priorities, regulatory friction, skill gaps, and missing capital derail progress. Needs are multi-stakeholder: patients want outcomes; clinicians need workflow-fit and evidence; hospitals and insurers require ROI; companies must prove scalable business models. A modern TTO can meet this complexity not as a paperwork office but as a conductor—reducing information asymmetries, matching founders, arranging gap financing, building industry links, and enforcing best-practice roadmaps—so promising ideas are validated early for user desirability and economic viability, then guided all the way to real-world use.

What you’ll learn

Why fragmented point solutions underperform without interoperable, standards-based records and shared infrastructure
How open national platforms set rules, standards, and reimbursement so public and private actors can collaborate at scale
What “patient information pathways” are—and how they integrate prevention, acute care, and chronic management end to end
Which countries offer instructive models, from India’s ABDM to Israel’s data exchange and Finland’s Digital Health Village
Where health systems can capture value by linking RPM, e-prescriptions, IDs, and EPRs into a trusted, national ecosystem

Tobias Silberzahn is a trained biochemist and has worked in the field of healthcare innovation for more than 15 years. Currently, Tobias is a Senior Fellow for BSt Gesundheit gGmbH, a daughter organization of Bertelsmann Foundation, where his focus topics are trusted health information and the digital transformation of healthcare. In addition, Tobias works with the Grameen organization, founded by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to establish a digital health platform for Bangladesh and is a Patient Ambassador for FH Europe Foundation.