The interview partners
Prof. Dr. Patrick Da-Cruz is Professor of Business Administration and Health Management at the Faculty of Health Management at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences (HNU) and Academic Director of the MBA program in Leadership and Management in Healthcare. Prior to joining HNU, Mr. Da-Cruz worked for renowned strategy consultancies in the pharmaceutical/healthcare sector and held management positions in healthcare companies in Germany and abroad.
Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser studied economics and social pedagogy and earned her doctorate at the Chair of General Banking, Insurance, and Banking Management at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. During her professional career, she held various management positions in companies in the field of hospital management and consulting. Feser's chapter at HNU began in 2000: initially as a professor of health management, and from 2006 as president of the university. From 2012 to 2020, Feser was a member of the board of Hochschule Bayern e.V., including four years as chairwoman. From 2006 to 2017, she was chairwoman/deputy chairwoman of the arbitration committee pursuant to §17c KHG in Baden-Württemberg, chairwoman of the BayWISS steering committee in 2024, and spokesperson for the HRK-AG Health Sciences from 2024 to early 2026. Since May 2022, she has been the representative of the universities on the Bavarian Media Council. After four terms as HNU president, Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser will retire in 2026.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing the healthcare system in the coming years?
Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser: The healthcare system is undergoing a period of massive transformation. Medical and technological advances are coinciding with significant political, social, and demographic changes. The pressure to act has now increased to such an extent that things that were previously considered sacrosanct are now being discussed. Technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital networking are finally becoming widespread in everyday healthcare.
The major challenges and associated opportunities will be:
Bureaucracy: Digital documentation is intended to reduce the workload, but it is often still not very user-friendly and time-consuming, especially when switching between analog and digital.
Data protection: The balancing act between data use for research and privacy remains a key issue.
The shortage of skilled workers: This is currently the bottleneck in healthcare. There is a shortage not only of doctors, but also of nurses, therapists, and IT specialists.
Added to this are generational change, medical advances, and healthcare financing. The system must strike a balance between revenue and expenditure in order to remain affordable. One way to achieve this is to shift from reactive repair medicine to productive, preventive, and digitally supported care that gives citizens more personal responsibility.
In your opinion, which future skills will be crucial for success for healthcare executives in the next five years?
Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser: The healthcare sector is facing enormous upheaval. Today, traditional management tools are no longer sufficient to successfully tackle the upcoming transformation tasks, from skills shortages to digitalization and the shift to patient-centered care. What is needed instead are future skills that prepare healthcare executives for the challenges ahead.
Digital skills: Executives don't need to be programmers, but they do need to understand how AI can support tasks such as duty scheduling or diagnosis. They need to be able to critically question algorithms and check them for bias. They must argue rather than replace. They must have the ability to design workflows in such a way that AI relieves people rather than unsettling them.
Managers—especially in healthcare—need a high level of mental resilience: particularly in times of chronic staff shortages and high workloads, the mental health of the team is a strategic success factor. This requires an appropriate management style that actively recognizes stressors and creates a culture of error management that moves away from assigning blame and toward a process of continuous improvement (quality management).
Networked, cross-sector thinking is becoming a decisive success factor in providing holistic patient care. This requires learned, practiced, and lived interdisciplinarity and interprofessionality: cooperation with nursing staff, cost bearers, and IT experts on an equal footing, as well as, crucially, patient empowerment. Understanding patients as active partners in the healing process and learning to align processes accordingly will be crucial for medical and economic success.
What can universities contribute to the transfer process in healthcare?
Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser: By 2026, universities will no longer be purely knowledge-transfer institutions, but will combine teaching with research and transfer in order to train solution-oriented, responsible future leaders.
The traditional separation of disciplines should be largely abandoned in favor of interprofessional teaching: medical, nursing, and therapeutic staff will work together to develop treatment pathways and train in real teamwork.
The traditional separation of disciplines should be broken down. Universities will integrate new core competencies directly into their courses, for example, digital health as a compulsory subject, so that students can learn how to use AI-supported diagnostic tools or electronic patient records from the very first semester.
Universities must become transfer centers (living labs) in order to design test environments for new forms of care, e.g., real-world laboratories for nursing assistance; start-up incubators for innovative digital therapies.
Universities must evolve into lifelong learning partners and offer part-time formats and modular certificates, known as micro-credentials, such as AI ethics or AI use in cross-sector patient management.
Furthermore, there is a need for more part-time formats—hybrid learning models—that enable medical, technical, and business personnel to continue their education at a high level alongside their professional activities.
And finally, universities have outstanding scientists who can research the challenges of this change and develop solutions in study, research, and transfer projects. They are valuable contacts, especially for stakeholders in the region.
What is HNU doing specifically?
Prof. Dr. Uta M. Feser: HNU, and in particular the Faculty of Health Management, is actively shaping the healthcare of tomorrow. Through our interdisciplinary approach, we combine knowledge from business, technology, and medicine to shape the future of the healthcare industry. We focus on innovative ideas and patient-oriented solutions and make an important contribution to a dynamic and growing industry. The university offers both management courses, such as business administration in healthcare, and healthcare-related courses, such as physician assistant, as well as a bachelor's degree in digital health and a master's degree in digital healthcare management for technology enthusiasts. Entrepreneurship, AI, and future skills are cross-cutting themes that are integrated into all programs. In order to best prepare students for their careers after graduation, project seminars, business games, and excursions are core components of the program. Many of the academic continuing education programs are aimed at target groups in the healthcare sector. At the bachelor's level, these include management for healthcare and nursing professions and evidence-based nursing, and at the master's level, MBA leadership and management in healthcare. In addition, the scientists conduct research on topics such as healthcare provision, digitalization in healthcare, transformation, and ethical issues, bringing international perspectives to the discourse.
Another aspect of the holistic and concrete approach to health is the student health management program at HNU, for which HNU has also received awards. The focus is on physical and mental health, as well as student participation in planning and implementation.
Thank you very much for talking to us!
The content and statements presented in the interviews reflect the perspective of the interviewees and do not necessarily correspond to the position of the editorial team.
