In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, the intersection of medicine and technology is transforming the way we approach patient care, treatment and long-term health management and artificial intelligence (AI) and shared decision making (SDM) is at the center of it all. Dr. Sven Jungmann, physician and entrepreneur combines two important areas of expertise. With his medical background and passion for tackling broader healthcare challenges, Dr. Jungmann has expanded his focus beyond the confines of hospitals and is committed to the power of digital solutions, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in improving healthcare systems.
In this interview, Dr. Jungmann discusses the critical role of AI and digital tools in the management of chronic conditions such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and provides insights into how technology can support both patients and healthcare providers. He also emphasizes the need for intelligent, ethically responsible healthcare solutions that free up doctors and nurses while improving the patient experience. Through his entrepreneurial activities, his writings and his research, Dr. Jungmann continues to advocate for change with the goal of creating more efficient, humane and patient-centered healthcare.
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More InformationTable of Contents
Introduction – Who is Dr. Sven Jungmann?
It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity of making a small contribution here, Nele. Thank you so much.
I’m a physician by training who realized early on that I wanted to tackle the bigger challenges in healthcare—beyond the walls of a single clinic or hospital. Don’t get me wrong: We absolutely need dedicated doctors and nurses who serve patients one-on-one. But I also believe we need people who can help multiply the impact of practitioners through technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital tools.
Right now, too many healthcare systems are on the verge of financial collapse. We’re not training enough healthcare providers, and many of those who are trained end up frustrated by bureaucratic hurdles, way too many overhours, poor working conditions, and low payment (many people are still surprised when they find out how little many doctors actually earn). If we want sustainable, high-quality care, we need to embrace automation and digital solutions as much as possible in a smart, ethically responsible way. This includes everything from shared decision making to leveraging modern sensors and AI.
Personally, I love working across different disciplines—whether with engineers, designers, psychologists, economists, or physicists. It stretches my thinking and brings such a diversity of perspectives. Being an entrepreneur compounds this thrill: practically everything becomes your playground, and while that can be intense (I’ll admit it’s hard to “switch off”), it’s also incredibly rewarding.
Information on apps and digital solutions for people with MS
Which apps and digital solutions for people with MS do you find particularly helpful and why?
MS is complex; it can manifest as bowel or bladder dysfunction, depression, epilepsy, fatigue, sleep disturbances—you name it. It might be more practical for people with MS to assemble a small collection of apps that address their unique challenges. In that spirit, here are some apps that are regularly recommended:
- Disease-Specific Apps:
- My MS Manager: Developed by the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America. It’s HIPAA-compliant and lets you track symptoms, manage medication reminders, and even create reports for your healthcare team.
- Floodlight MS: Developed with input from leading MS experts. It gamifies tasks to measure hand function, walking ability, and thinking skills, then shares the data with your doctor.
- Lifestyle & Energy Management Apps:
- BEST Suite: It includes tools such as PaceMyDay (helpful for energy and fatigue), ReachMyGoals, and StrategizeMyLife. These help you plan your day, track progress toward health goals, and remain mindful of your energy levels.
- Care Clinic: A broad app that manages both chronic and acute conditions. You can track symptoms, keep medication logs, and even monitor multiple family members.
- Medication & Reminder Apps:
- Medisafe: This is great if you have multiple prescriptions or need reminders. It also checks for potential drug interactions.
- Community Apps:
- BelongMS: A social network for people with MS and their caregivers. You can find support groups, chat with experts, organize health records, and get emotional support all in one place.
But also general fitness, mindfulness, or nutrition apps to help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight can be great. There’s a lot available nowadays that I would recommend.
These solutions are evolving fast. So, any “top app” list today might be different in six months as new tech, regulations, and user needs keep changing. In fact, I think the time is now coming where we will stop approaching healthcare in ‘disease silos’ and increasingly, large language models like Google’s Gemini for health solution could be able to help you manage your health holistically in just one app rather than scattered over a multitude of app.
How can digital health solutions help to make everyday life easier for people with MS?
The big value is twofold. First, they help you organize all the data around your symptoms, your daily routines, and any overlapping conditions—often in ways that are easy for you to share with your medical team. MS can be unpredictable, so logging things like fatigue or medication side effects can be a game-changer when you meet with your doctor. Second, apps can support healthy behaviors—like tracking workouts, ensuring you stay on top of physical therapy routines, or reminding you to take your meds on time.
I also encourage people with MS (and honestly anyone with a chronic disease) to harness large language models such as ChatGPT for quick research or preparing questions for upcoming doctor visits. For instance, if you’re planning a holiday or trying out a new hobby, AI can suggest ways to adapt and manage common MS-related concerns. Of course, you need to verify everything with your medical professionals, but it’s a great tool to spark ideas and better structure your conversations.
General tips for evaluating and using digital health solutions
In your opinion, what criteria are important for evaluating digital health solutions?
First, ask your doctor if they have experience with specific digital tools. Healthcare providers who are already familiar with certain apps can give you deeper insights, including potential pitfalls or how to integrate the data into your care.
Second, look for clinical validation. If an app has published studies on PubMed showing genuine clinical benefits—or if it’s been piloted in a reputable setting—that’s a good sign. If you’re in Europe, check if it has a CE mark. Some countries also have official bodies that recommend or accredit health apps, so see if your region does that.
If you’re not scientifically trained, you can even use ChatGPT to summarize complex studies or user reviews and tell you how much the findings are applicable to your individual situation, but keep in mind that AI sometimes “hallucinates” facts. Always keep a critical eye on the source material.
How can people with MS involve their doctors in the use of digital health solutions and what are the advantages and hurdles?
You definitely want a doctor who is open to, or at least curious about, digital health. Be upfront: “I’m considering these apps to better track my symptoms and stay on top of my care. Do you have any recommendations regarding these apps or any alternatives? And are you interested in seeing the data?” Let them know what you hope to achieve—maybe track fatigue patterns or manage medication side effects more precisely—and ask for their honest feedback. Doctors with experience in digital treatment aides will be able to share with you lessons learned from other patients that might share some similarities with you.
One big hurdle is that many digital tools aren’t integrated into clinical workflows or official guidelines. Doctors often worry they’ll get flooded with unstructured data they don’t have time to interpret. So, when you pick an app, pick one that’s known for producing clear, concise, and guideline-relevant data. That way, you’re more likely to have a constructive conversation with your doctor—and they’ll see the value instead of extra complexity.
Why is it important that digital health solutions are designed with people in mind, rather than specifically for patients or doctors?
When companies say they’re “radically patient-centric,” it often sounds wonderful—but in practice, healthcare is a team sport. Patients, doctors, nurses, caregivers, family members, and even insurers all interact in some way. If an app is designed only with patient needs in mind and ignores clinical requirements and everything else, it can end up making life harder for doctors or nurses—leading to friction, incomplete information, or confusion. And that’s bad news for patients, too.
A truly people-centric approach considers the reality that healthcare is a complex ecosystem. The best solutions simplify the flow of information and reduce hassles for everyone involved. Given staff shortages, burnout, and ever-rising demand for care, we can’t afford more friction. I’m not suggesting that you need to build an app that solves everybody’s problems, but focusing only on patients is a shortcut that is often too lazy and problematic. We need friction-less solutions that respect both patient preferences and the practical realities of clinicians.
Interaction of digital solutions and medical care
How can digital solutions help improve communication between people with MS and their doctors?
Structured data is gold. If you show up to your appointment with a neatly organized report of symptoms—like “I had trouble walking about 20% more often than usual last week,” or “I’ve been experiencing more fatigue in the mornings for the past two weeks”—your doctor can jump straight into problem-solving. This is so much more efficient than a vague recollection of how you “felt tired sometimes.” and there are many studies that show how flawed our human memory is. Apps and digital solutions can track much of that data for you, often times even without the need for you to do anything at all. This data can be immensely helpful—if it the apps presents in a way that the clinician can digest it quickly. The best apps help you present your data in alignment with clinical best practices and guidelines. That’s where real progress happens: your doctor sees the relevant information at a glance, and you have more time to discuss what really matters to you.
AI and shared decision making
Which specific AI applications do you consider particularly useful for decision-making in MS treatment?
I’m genuinely excited by both general-purpose and specialist AI models. Tools like ChatGPT or Gemini can help you quickly gather ideas, learn the key terms you need to know about your illness, get ideas on how to pursue a certain hobby with a specific chronic illness, or figure out which questions to ask your doctor. There are also more specialized models—like Glass.Health—that focus on clinical reasoning and can help with differential diagnoses or treatment pathways.
But keep in mind the pitfalls of AI. ChatGPT, for instance, can sound very confident while sometimes producing misinformation. Data privacy is another big concern; you don’t want to feed personal health details into a public AI service without ensuring your data is handled safely.
So, AI is amazing for brainstorming and expanding your knowledge, but it’s still critical to have professional oversight and remain critical. When used carefully, it can make shared decision making a lot more informed and personal.
Being an author
You have written a couple of books in German and English that are related to the medical field, AI and inventions in a broader perspective. What is your main goal with them and how do your various experiences come into place?
I found I was having the same conversations repeatedly—people asking me about the future of medicine, AI, how doctors, pharma, and medtech might evolve. And every week, I have a couple of doctors ask me how I managed to find a job outside of patient care (because so many are tired of it!) Books are a more scalable way to share my thoughts and research findings with a wider audience. They’re also therapeutic and educational for me as a writer: you clarify your own thinking by explaining it to others. And when you collaborate with co-authors, you spark conversations you’d never have on your own. It’s been wonderful to see these books reach thousands of people and to hear how these ideas help them think differently about health and technology.
Transforming power of AI
How can AI specifically contribute to more humane healthcare?
The first aspect is that AI can actually free up clinicians and nurses to do more of the human side of healthcare. Most doctors still spend embarrassing amounts of time typing off faxes, looking for printer paper, making phone calls, or filling out forms rather than being with patients. Most of that is entirely automatable. If we use AI to sift through mountains of data, doctors can spend less time doing administrative grunt work and more time talking to their patients face-to-face—understanding their lives, their fears, and their preferences.
More importantly, however, is that AI can, when combined with human expertise, provide insights that are specifically tailored to each patient. Imagine a future where a doctor and an AI system collaborate to interpret not just your medical imaging and lab tests, but also your personal values—like your tolerance for certain risks, your daily routines, your social support. This is where AI can help realize “what matters to you” medicine: it’s not just about the clinical diagnosis, but about how each decision fits into someone’s life and goals.
How do you think the role of medical personnel will change in a digitalized healthcare system that uses AI?
For the foreseeable future, we’ll still need human empathy and clinical judgment—especially when people are at their most vulnerable. Although: studies suggest that AI can outperform doctors on both clinical knowledge and empathetic communication. One thing is certain: memorizing endless facts will become less central because AI is far better at that. Instead, a key skill will be how effectively you can partner with AI: verifying the AI’s recommendations, spotting any biases or mistakes, asking the right questions, adapting the ‘output’ to a patient’s individual situation, and ensuring these tools respect patient dignity and privacy.
Most doctors won’t be replaced by AI, but by colleagues who use AI. People are often surprised when I share that I find nurses tend to be more open to these technologies than many doctors. Nurses see how AI can help reduce manual tasks and free them up for genuine patient care and often have a ‘let’s try and see’ see attitude with less ‘analysis paralysis’. Increasingly, robotics and bioengineering will also replace at least some manual tasks—like certain types of surgery—so doctors need to learn how to adapt wisely and quickly to stay relevant. The wave is coming; let’s learn to ride it.
Quickfire Q&A Session
Complete the sentence: "For me, multiple sclerosis is...."
…a disease that actually carries a lot of hope. With the pace of pharma research, bioengineering, and digital innovation, there’s a reasonable chance we’ll see a true cure in our lifetime.
What breakthrough in the digitalization of the healthcare system do you hope to see in the next three years?
We’ve had incredible breakthroughs in AI—now we need to adopt them quickly and safely. That means having standard frameworks for informed consent on data use, and standardized infrastructures for storing and sharing data. Right now, it feels like too many hospitals and companies are re-inventing the wheel. Additionally, guidelines need to be updated faster; some take years. With AI, we could have guidelines that evolve monthly, in line with the latest research. Imagine how many patients worldwide could benefit from that agility.
Which website can you recommend on the topic of digitalization and the use of AI in the healthcare system?
I personally like NEJM AI (ai.nejm.org) for cutting-edge medical AI discussions. TLDR.ai is more general but gives you a broader sense of what’s happening in AI. It’s good to see both the medical angle and the bigger AI picture.
Farewell
Finally, what message of hope or encouragement would you like to share with individuals living with MS?
Absolutely. It might help to know that top research centers, like UCSF, have been leading groundbreaking studies. We’ve seen that many people with MS now can live longer, more active lives than ever before—some remain disability-free decades after diagnosis. Researchers are even talking about a possible cure within our lifetime. So, there is a lot of hope. Stay informed, be open to new therapies and clinical studies, and partner actively with your healthcare team. Using digital solutions to track your symptoms, manage medications, and find supportive communities can make the journey smoother and more empowering.
How and where can interested people follow your research activities?
I’d love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn, where I regularly share updates and insights. I’m also planning to get more active on YouTube with short talks and interviews about the intersection of healthcare, AI, and entrepreneurship. And my company’s new website will go live soon: www.aiomics.io
I hope this interview has sparked your interest in trying out the new solutions available, while being aware of the possibilities and limitations of AI in shared decision making.
See you soon and try to make the best out of your life,
Nele
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