Stephan H. Schug, MD, MPH (Germany)
President, DGG German eHealth Association
Dr Stephan Schug is a general practitioner with a Diploma in Psychology and a Master of Public Health. Following clinical work, he has been active nationally and internationally as a digital health expert for around 30 years. He promotes high-quality, digitally enabled integrated care, in particular through semantically interoperable health records for cross-provider communication and for the meaningful use and reuse of data in practice, research and AI/machine learning. His work is guided by the principles of accessibility, patient-centredness, clinical utility, health literacy and collaboration. He is a co-founder of the German Digital Health Association (DGG e. V.), based in Frankfurt am Main, and today serves as its President. As former Chief Medical Officer of EHTEL, he has been continuously appointed as a member of the EC eHealth Stakeholder Group from its beginnings in 2008 up to its third mandate in 2019–2021. Currently, he leads the EHDS4All project at TMF e. V. and works as Chief Digital Health Strategist at IQmed.
As DGG-nominated expert in the Competence Centre for Interoperability in Healthcare (KIG) of Germany’s National Agency for Digital Medicine (gematik), he has in recent years made major contributions to landmark position papers, co-led task forces and consistently taken on editorial tasks. Topics include standards and their governance, continuity of care in chronic diseases, a cardiology core dataset and digital prescribing in the German electronic health record (ePA für alle). More broadly, his expertise reflects the scope of the EHDS Regulation: primary use (EHDS1), including cross-border eHealth services, the European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format (EEHRxF) and EHR system certification, as well as secondary use (EHDS2) with its new health data access bodies and secure processing environments.
DGG e. V. is Germany’s National Member of the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH). Founded in 1998, DGG is a long-standing digital health association that accelerates the development and meaningful routine use of eHealth, telemedicine and digital health services in Germany and Europe. Through a rich collaborative network, e.g. HIMSS communities, DGG supports mutual learning with a global perspective. DGG is a dialogue partner on EHDS, telemedicine and related topics for German legislators and implementers at federal and state level.