Awarded the Science Prize of the German Professional Society

Silke Frey, a grad­u­ate of the Mas­ter’s pro­gram in Health Eco­nom­ics, has been award­ed the Sci­ence Prize of the Ger­man Soci­ety for Mar­ket Access (DFGMA) for her Mas­ter’s the­sis in Novem­ber 2021. The DFGMA aims to dis­cuss and pro­vide food for thought on issues relat­ed to mar­ket access and mar­ket devel­op­ment of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts as well as med­ical devices.

In her mas­ter’s the­sis, the grad­u­ate focused on the accep­tance of dig­i­tal health appli­ca­tions (DiGA) in acti­vat­ing ther­a­pies. Using an online sur­vey, Silke Frey exam­ined the poten­tial and chal­lenges of such appli­ca­tions from the per­spec­tive of health­care providers. Rem­e­dy providers are ser­vice providers of reme­dies in the fields of phys­io­ther­a­py, occu­pa­tion­al ther­a­py and voice, speech and lan­guage ther­a­py. The results of the work show that there is still a con­sid­er­able infor­ma­tion deficit among this pro­fes­sion­al group with regard to dig­i­tal health appli­ca­tions. Nev­er­the­less, the vast major­i­ty of respon­dents can imag­ine inte­grat­ing them into their treat­ment in the future. In addi­tion to the DFGMA Sci­ence Award, Silke Frey pub­lished the results of her work in the Feb­ru­ary issue of the jour­nal ‘Mar­ket Access & Health Policy’.

And the HOST grad­u­ate is already work­ing on a fol­low-up project. She pre­sent­ed the results of this at the annu­al con­fer­ence of the Ger­man Soci­ety for Health Eco­nom­ics (dggö) in Ham­burg in the last week of March. The man­u­script has also already been final­ized and sub­mit­ted to an inter­na­tion­al jour­nal for peer review.

In the future, Silke Frey would like to con­tin­ue her research in this area and pos­si­bly also do a doc­tor­ate on it. Her new posi­tion as a research asso­ciate at the Insti­tute of Fam­i­ly Med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty Hos­pi­tal of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bonn gives her the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so. The Insti­tute, which is involved in the field of gen­er­al med­i­cine, con­sists of a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team from areas such as gen­er­al med­i­cine, health ser­vices research, psy­chol­o­gy, soci­ol­o­gy, health eco­nom­ics, infor­ma­tion sys­tems, infor­mat­ics and epidemiology.