Colleagues working on the project
Dr. Rainer Thiel is Director of empirica Communication and Technology Research in Bonn, Germany, and responsible for the Digital Health Business Unit.
Rainer has over 20 years of experience in research, education and consulting, including public policy studies, economic theory application in political action, and impact assessments with a focus on policy reform, regulatory affairs, health systems and digital health. He led the 2021 European Commission study on eHealth, Interoperability of Health Data and Artificial Intelligence for Health and Care in the EU and was main author of the high-profile report #SmartHealthSystems – International comparison of health system digitalisation strategies, analysing technical readiness and policy reforms in OECD countries. He has been leading work packages on market research, deployment strategies and business modelling for a multitude of EU research projects on AI and data strategies in Health. Rainer consulted and benchmarked national health ministries on their digital health policies.
Malte von Tottleben
B.Sc. European Public Health
M.Sc. Healthcare Policy, Innovation and Management
Malte specialises in business planning, evaluation and impact assessment of ICT-related healthcare services. He studied European Public Health (B.Sc.) as well as Healthcare Policy, Innovation and Management at Maastricht University (M.Sc.) in the Netherlands. Malte was engaged in the H2020 funded projects “CareWell”, “C3-Cloud” and “Precise4Q”, “Back-UP”, “interopEHRate” and “EarlyCause” and the HE funded projects “VALIDATE”, “ENT1DEP and “SMASH-HCM”. Malte led the socio-economic evaluations, business model planning, trial protocol development, communication and dissemination work as well as project management. exploitation activities.
Shahan Tariq has first experience in applying Sociao-Economic Impact Assessment methods as part of the HE-funded UNICOM project, in which he is supporting the definition of a CBA framework for assessing the impact of having a univocal identification of medicinal projects across Europe.
Karin Breuer works in European project administration at empirica. She read German language and literature as well as Social Sciences at Bonn University where she gained a teacher’s degree. She worked 5 years in Dublin in third level institutions, teaching bilingual commercial courses up to and including degree level, post graduate and MBA courses which prepared students for work within the European Community. Karin joined empirica in 1998 and has since been involved in project administration and co-ordination of numerous projects in different EU programmes. Apart from German she speaks English, Dutch and French and has a basic knowledge of Spanish and Japanese.
Meropi Papagheorghe (female) is Deputy Head of Project Administration at empirica. She holds an MA in North American Studies, with a focus on Gender Studies (University of Bonn). Meropi is experienced in the administrative coordination of large international consortia in the areas of energy, skills and digital health. She has assured regulatory compliance of numerous projects within several EU programmes and is responsible for financial and administrative project reporting. Meropi is fluent in English, Romanian, and German.