Workplace in Focus Podcast Episode 5 Transcript

COVID-19 is an international issue. Hear first hand how this pandemic is viewed on a global scale and German physician, Sven Jungmann’s, perspective on the matter.

[ANNOUNCER] You have questions about what’s impacting the healthcare system – from pandemics to products. We have answers. Welcome to Banner|Aetna Workplace in Focus. Now here's your host, Banner|Aetna Market Head of Sales, Jon Dingledine.

[DINGLEDINE] Welcome back to another addition of Banner|Aetna workplace in focus. We’re all aware of the challenges we’ve faced in Arizona and the U.S. over the past few months with the COVID-19 Pandemic as it continues to surge. Today’s guest, Dr. Sven Jungmann, provides insight into how other parts of the world are dealing with the Pandemic. I was fortunate enough to meet Sven at a graduate program we participated in at Stanford University. I’m excited to hear him share how the pandemic has affected his home country, Germany. Sven, we’re glad you’re here and excited to hear what you have to say.

[JUNGMANN] Thank you very much for having me. It's really exciting and hi to everybody from Berlin and Germany.

[DINGLEDINE] Yep. Terrific. So Sven, just an overview, what has the COVID-19 pandemic been like in Germany?

[JUNGMANN] Yeah, there were different phases. And I’m sure it's different for different parts of the country, but I can certainly speak for Berlin. I think you have to understand where Germany is coming from. So ever since the war it has been quite a peaceful country, but we also lived through the post-war cold war times. And were really really proud of all the freedoms we have. So these days you can walk to France. Nobodies go to check your passport. You can travel freely for all of Europe and work anywhere. The German passport is the one that gives you the most access to the most countries in the world. And suddenly for the first time ever since we realized that is not something we should take for granted because some borders were closed, or if you were to travel to Israel you would be quarantined for 14 days. The borders to Poland were completely shut down, and you would have trucks piling up over miles and miles of just trucks so that eight organizations had to come and feed people and give them water supplies and so on. So that was a shocking realization I think. At the same time in the early phases people were quite afraid so you would have a lot of people purchasing toilet paper on or pasta. After a while I think things got a bit calmer. People started to get bored a bit. We really trust our government, and we really trust Murkel. They had very clear announcements and I think people were following it really well. That certainly helped. But then you know people went out on the streets. Met out for a beer like Germans usually do with the right, appropriate amount of distance. And had kind of a new normal of reality. And a lot of new friendships were made, because somebody would meet in the parks, and people could mingle a little bit, again with the distance. Sometimes police had to remind us, but generally things were really friendly. I had a friend who was sitting in a park, and then a police officer comes up and says madame you know you're not allowed to sit in the park. You have to do sports if you want to move around. ANd she goes oh do you want me to run away from you? And he said no, no it's fine you can also walk, we consider that a sport. I don't care, but sitting certainly isn't one as far as I'm concerned. And so I think things were really friendly and nice in the beginning. Another thing that surprised me positively was to see how we helped each other. SO German hospitals would suddenly take patients from Italy who flew in. We would try to share masks wherever we could. This could all have gotten better I think, but it was a beautiful sign I find.

[DINGLEDINE] Interesting so it sounds like there's a couple surprises that come out of all of this, so what kind of maybe lifestyle changes or some maybe other things that have changed or that maybe have surprised you that did not occur in the past.

[JUNGMANN] Right, interesting question. I think that one thing that really surprised me was what we call the rise of the everyday entrepreneurs. So people who discover there's a problem in our neighborhood. Elderly people can't go and properly buy groceries, so let's help them. Or somebody is quarantined, let's make sure that they get all the supplies that they need and they will set up maybe whatsapp groups. There was a big initiative to help fight domestic violence through an app, and so on. So this was quite nice. I work in the healthcare sector, and I also found that people were really finding innovation generally so there's one pharmaceutical company that always fought for us. Innovation is pharmaceutical engineering. Creating new drugs. And now everybody realized the big innovation must happen in the supply chain, so that we can make sure people get what they need. That was quite impressive I find, and I think the scientific community suddenly started to collaborate much more than they previously would, because they had a different sense of urgency. And competition didn't matter as much as achieving something. We had businesses helping hospitals. Ketlon, which is a retailer of sports outfits, donated some of their diving masks to an Italian hospital or French hospital. I think to make sure that they could stay protected as an experiment at least. Yeah I think those were some of the biggest changes I saw. On a personal level I think we communicated much differently, so we started cooking virtually or with Zoom. I suddenly had friends from Washington and from California join a dinner virtually with people from Cologne and people from Berlin and so on. Really good friendships came out of this.

[DINGLEDINE] That's a great outcome of all of this. So you know you're uniquely positioned in the fact that you are a medical doctor seeing that you have that expertise, but you also have a passion around digital technology and innovation. So when you think about the healthcare system, and the German healthcare system. What are the biggest changes that you've observed, or that maybe you're expecting in the German healthcare system as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

[JUNGMANN] Yes, so I truly believe that COVID didn't change things quite as much as it made it accelerated or made some things more obvious. So the German healthcare system has been frustratingly reluctant to adopt new technologies for a long time, and a year and a half ago a new health minister started. And he has been instrumental in changing the way we go about adopting digital technologies, so we created a new law which is called the digital care act when our insurance companies have to pay for apps that add benefits to patients and add criteria to this. But this is quite new, and he did many other things to really move forward. And so it was already going into that direction, but when I was working as a doctor it was often quite frustrating. I had to see patients who were getting chemotherapy, and make them come in using public transport, where they were exposed to germs, coming into the hospital, relatives taking the day off. And then I drew blood, and found out we couldn't give them the next chemo today, and it would have to come in. I dont know two or three days you chose. And I can't guarantee that it will work this time. ANd then they were in the hospital again exposed to potential germs, which does not have to be. And now suddenly with COVID everybody embraces telemedicine. I had doctors approach asking me if we could help set up things. ANd you could see how suddenly they really saw the need for it. So I think in general for what it's worth, I think it helped us drive innovation faster, and get more buy in from it. We also had a surprising event. So Germany, as some of you might know, Germans are really afraid of sharing their data. It's probably because of our history with quite some oppressive stakes. There's a general mistrust in putting anything in a cloud. But with COVID we created a, the government created a new app that had 11,000, 11,000,000 sorry downloads within just two weeks. ANd our product population is 8 million so that was very significant, and had you asked me in December I would have said well probably five people would download this. And in other countries it didn't work quite so well so I could see that because we have very strict data protection rules, and because people trust our government and so the need they would do something again that half a year nobody would believe that so many people would do it in Germany.

[DINGLEDINE] So in Germany as a result of the pandemic, what I hear you saying is people were more willing to share their data on this app which would be things like their location and some other things right?

[JUNGMANN] So actually the clever bit is it doesnt share your location.

[DINGLEDINE] Ok

[JUNGMANN] All it does is if you have been in contact with somebody else so you just exchange numbers. ANd if the other person turns out to have COVID you will get notified, but they don't need to know where you were. Otherwise it wouldn't fly in Germany.

[DINGLEDINE] Haha. Yeah that would be a little, that would be a little too much I can, I can imagine. But clearly its people helping people in the middle of what it is, what is clearly something that we are all challenged with so that's good to see. Sort of along those lines, there are many people talking about a new normal being experienced. To what degree do you think the pandemic is driving this change, or will drive this change? And what do we need to do to make sure that the right changes are made to ensure our healthcare system?

[JUNGMANN] Oh yeah that's something that we discuss a lot and have thought about a lot as well. So in the big term, I'm sure you've heard that in the U.S. as well, we  need to flatten the curve. And what they meant was keep your social distance to avoid you or other people being infected, because we need to make sure that there is enough slack capacity or search capacity in the hospitals, so that we don't go run into a situation where we don't have enough ventilators or not enough intensive care beds for those who are in need. And I think going forward we need to redefine what it means to flatten the curve. For me it's two-fold. One is most of the people that had to go into the intensive care unit were people who had a lot of chronic illnesses, and most of them are preventable. So could we maybe move away from a situation where we always need to cure towards where we invest much more resources in trying to prevent, and in doing so we have a healthier population that is much more able to stomach things like a COVID pandemic and we don't even need to talk about keeping the ICU beds. The second to mention is I think is smoothening supply and demand. So some hospitals were overcrowded, and others had two complete ICU units empty. And we didnt where the next peaks were coming, because we were in the beginning not very good at collecting the same amount of data. So I think we could use more of a sort of digital platforms to better understand where we need to put in all of our efforts to flatten curves. And the second question you asked is what do we need to get there? So I think that a regulation plays an important role. For us the digital care act that I mentioned earlier I think has a great potential and I would invite other policy makers to think about doing something similar where sort of developing digital technologies also ends up creating a good revenue stream for you so that it's worth the investment. But there are more things to do right? I think regulators need to step up to improve data and equality standards, and make sure that we measure the same things. SO you know in some hospitals if you would get tested twice to get a confirmation test that would count as two cases. In another one it was per person. In other countries they wouldn't even measure unless they really thought this is a very high likelihood of infection. And so on, and so on. So we need to get better at harmonizing these things as it's a global problem.

[DINGLEDINE] So you mentioned flattening the curve, and one thing that we experienced here in the United States is you know we saw a spike in many parts of the country the curve flattened a little bit and now there's a kind of a second spike if you will. What were some hot spots? Can you give us some context on what Germany went through. Did you have one spike and it flattened, or a couple different spikes? Or what does that curve look like as you talk about flattening the curve?

[JUNGMANN] Yeah so we have a federal system like the U.S. we have a federal system where these individuals, they're not as big as the American states, but they have quite some independence on how to commit management. So the federal government gives recommendations, and some cases they insist on things but in many cases they leave it up to local authorities. So you would see some differences, and they were mostly analyzing what works and what not. Should we open school or not, and really trying to make earnings as fast as possible. And then there are some cultural differences. There were, or regional differences, there was one incident where a lot of people went to Austria to go skiing and this was a huge hot spot for an outbreak and these people would travel back to Germany and spread it over there. We got really lucky, because Cologne loves Carnival and thousands, of thousands, thousands took to the streets to party and it was already known that COVID was out and they just didn't care because they never cared. Come what may there gonna party on the street and Carnival. And somehow nothing happened. Nothing happened. They got lucky. I guess there's a deep break of luck. But I think what would've, what went really well was (Chancellor Angela) Merkel stood up and said this was the biggest challenge we've had since World War II. I'm gonna be very frank, she makes no lie, she was very (direct), she's a physicist so you know she has this very dry German attitude to it. And we know that every word is very well thought through. And people knew exactly what to read into it, and it was very clear that we have to all be responsible now, and sort of stay away for awhile. And that, that worked extremely well.

[DINGLEDINE] Ok. That makes sense. Final thoughts Sven. Is there a final thought or two that you'd like to leave our audience with?

[JUNGMANN] Yeah. I'm very pleased that I have the chance to speak to Americans, and I know that your country has two challenges, two big challenges at the moment that you're facing at the same time. And I just wanna, I was reflecting on that. I had the opportunity of coming to the states a few times when I was a teenager, and then last year going to Stanford for a really nice program. And I have to say that there is something that really changed me as a person that I learned from America, and something that I think is extremely important for you as you go through these crises as well. And, and it is to some degree especially with COVID a lot of the conversations had were around technology. How can technology help us solve these problems? But we must not forget one thing, and that's in the end of the day these technologies are all important, but we have to keep in mind the ultimate purpose. And the ultimate purpose on my view is to fast strong human connections. And to help each other, and to be there for each other and one another. And if technology happens through that, that's great. But for me I think I often find it's the American culture being quite emotional on one side which I think is a very good thing. And on the other hand very supportive of one another, very positive. And I think that as you go to what's defining your new normal, I would recommend that you sort of go back to that and remind yourself of this. It is a great nation. It has off many other challenges. And I'm sure with this course if you can rekindle it, and you will come out stronger out of this.

[DINGLEDINE] Perfect. Hey Sven thank you so much for spending a few minutes with us today, and sharing your thoughts. The perspective that you've given us on how another country has faced the various challenges on COVID has been interesting and very refreshing, and we greatly appreciate your time so thank you.

[JUNGMANN] Thank You.

[DINGLEDINE] Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of Banner\Aetna Workplace in Focus. Tune in in two weeks to hear from another exciting guest and get more insight into the issues impacting your health, healthcare and your daily life. I’m Jon Dingledine. Stay safe and have a great couple of weeks. 

[ANNOUNCER] You've been listening to Banner|Aetna Workplace in Focus. Learn more at banneraetna.com.