If you are wondering why I have an exotic first name (or last name depending on where in the world you are reading this), it is because I originally come from Damascus, Syria. I used to be married and took my ex-wife’s last name. My original last name is Natafji (Now in the process of getting my last name back).

After a close friend of mine was arrested in 2012 inside the univesity, it was clear to me that I had to drop out from college and start over somewhere else (at that time I was studying medicine at the university of Damascus).

Education

Education was very important to me. So dropping out from college without having an alternative wasn’t an option. I used to stay long hours in the evening trying to search for and contact universities overseas where I could continue my medical education. After several months I decided to apply for a student visa to Germany and start over there. After receiving my visa in 2013, I moved to Germany and started learning German. A couple months later, I was admitted to medical school and graduated from the Charité university hospital in 2021 in Berlin.

I went to 2 quite popular medical schools in Germany: Marburg University and Charité University hospital, from which I graduated in 2021. During my studies I received a scholarship for talented and high achiever students from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The scholarship is not just about financial support. In my opinion it is primarily about being part of a community, a safe space, that shares similar values and create the right atmosphere to learn and accept new perspectives. It is also a place to debate and argue. While going to university helped me learn about medicine, being a scholar helped me learn about politics, economics, society and communication. It helped me learn a lot about myself and the society.

Startups

During medical school I wanted to try something else than just being a doctor working in a clinic. So I started looking for startups to join as a medical student. The first medical startup I joined was creating podcasts for medical students and doctors and selling them as a subscription. I used to listen to them and I really liked them. So I wrote the founder an email, whether I can help out as a working student. We did an interview on the phone and I started working there. After a couple of months I learned my first lesson about startups: having a cool product on the outside, doesn’t mean that the startup is working well on the inside. After sometime I started applying for other medical startups: This time I joined one of europe’s biggest telehealth providers. A swedish company that was coming to Germany. They have just secured an investment and were building a team to launch their product in Germany. My job was to build an SEO databank about health information. There I learned about power dynamics in startups. I learned about compartmentalization, work culture and how to reduce costs (hire an intern with high GPA). I also learned it is very hard to enter the German healthcare market.

During my last year of medical studies in 2021 I wanted to have a more key role in medical startups. So I started looking for co-founder or chief medical officers vacancies. So I found this small startup that just got a financing in form of a scholarship from the state (it is called Berliner Startup Scholarship or Stipendium in German). It was a team of 3 and I would join them as a co-founder and chief medical officer. It was the perfect match. We were building an app for patients with heart diseases. The plan was to certify the app as a medical product and get it admitted as a DIGA. DIGA is short for digital health application (Digitale Gesundheitsanwendung). In short if your app is certified as a DIGA, all public healthcare insurances will cover the costs for the app. On paper this is a huge opportunity since 90% of the German population has public healthcare insurance. This meant access to millions of customers (74,9 million insurers to be accurate as of March 2024). Now here is the catch: Certifying your health app as a DIGA is very long and costly: it takes on average 2 years and cost around 100K. You have to proof in a randomised control trial (RCT) that your app offers more measurable benefits compared than other solutions. I think the keyword here is measurable. Usually these benefits are measured using questionnaire with scores. Something like How much better do you feel today compares to last week? This brings us to the next problem with DIGAs: How beneficial are they, really? Seeing changes in scores based on the subjective answers is questionable. And you will have hard time convincing scientists and physicians that these trials justify using an App as an alternative to other other solutions especially when the App costs are incredibly high. Which brings us to the third and last problem about DIGAs: they are unjustifiably expensive. The cost varies between 240 and 750€ per quarter (3 months). Who would pay at least 80€ subscription per month to use an app? Many healthcare startups that had a certified DIGA went bankrupt, why? Very few doctors were willing to prescribe them.

Research

If you are still reading, it means that you realised by now that I like medicine and startups, which is true. But about science? Well I finished my doctoral dissertation in public health. I developed a novel method to measure amenable deaths in a closed population. The method is called normative life tables, which represents an ideal life table (we can also describe it as an ideal state) for patients with certain diseases and demographic variables (e.g. sex, age). For example if a 50 year old man has COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) in the US, then he should ideally live for another 21.01 years. We can only apply this method to certain chronic or infectious conditions. Why is this method useful? You can measure avoidable deaths using only demographic measures that we access through databanks like the WONDER from the CDC. We don’t have to spend millions of dollars to try to find out how and where to improve healthcare. If we know that a 50 year old man has 21 years left and someone in Kentucky for example is dying by 60 from COPD, then we know that there are shortcomings in healthcare in Kentucky regarding patients with COPD (This is a real example from my dissertation, the reasons has to do with increased hospitalisation rates, limited access to healthcare providers, specialists, COPD management and rehabilitation programs).

What about Lab work? I used to be a tutor in Biochemistry and Microbiology during my medical studies. I had my own lab in biochemistry to conduct, explain and supervise the experiments. In microbiology we used to analyse the bacteria using different tests like coagulase and catalase and study them under microscope. I loved working there. I loved doing experiments and learning new things.

What are my plans now? I realised that doing research is something that I enjoyed and have missed. I would love to do a postdoc preferably in the intersection of Tech and medicine, the two things I am passionate about. And I want to write and share knowledge from great researchers around the world. One thing that made me really happy distilizing complex and difficult topics and explain them in very simple ways, making them understandable to everyone.

About my personal life:

I was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. When I tell people that, almost everyone assumes that I am a refugee, that I am traumatised due to the war, and ask me where my parents are living. So if you are thinking about these questions, please stop. I am not and never have been a refugee, in fact I am a proponent of legal and regulated migration, I am yet to meet someone in this world without trauma, and my parents are doing well.

I finished high school when I was 17 years old with one of the highest GPAs in the country ( I even got an award from my school). My great grandfather was an influential doctor and politician, who co founded the the faculty of medicine in Damascus university. I studied medicine in Damascus University for 2 years. In 2013, when I was 19 years old, I applied for a student visa to Germany and moved there in June of the same year. In 2021 I became a German citizen.

I view myself as Middle eastern. I feel connected to the story of the middle east. I like the old city of Damascus (the oldest Capital in the world), the history, the food, certain aspects of the culture like hospitality. I also like drinking and brewing my own beer. Living in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) for 14 years had of course its influence on me. I like punctuality, I like doing things with accuracy, I think, write and dream in German, I have a German last name, sometimes I act more German than my German friends. So what does that make of me? I think it makes me a person with his own story and beliefs. It makes of me someone who doesn’t like to be reduced to prejudices about a culture or a place of birth. I think everyone of us has his and her own story and we ought to see them for the person he or she is. By showing interest in their beliefs, personality, activities, politics, the tv-shows and movies they like, they podcasts they listen to, the authors they like, not by making the conversation about background or place of birth. It is the most superficial thing anyone can do.

My favourite politician is Ronald Reagan. My favorits philosophers are Jon Stwerat Mill, Friedrich von Hayek, Michael Sandel and Milton Firedman ( I am a true liberal). My favourite authors are Malcoms Gladwell, Yuval Noah Harrari, Atul Gawand, Nassim Taleb, Eric Topol and believe or not Arnold Schwarzenegger. My Favourite Podcasts are: Revisionist history, Huberman Lab, on Topic with Jay shetty, and ground truths with Eric Topol (Amazing doctor, author and scientist).

If you have questions, you can write me anytime at: yesser.falk@gmail.com

Don’t be shy.