The new professorship and Division of General Medicine at the Mannheim Medical Faculty emerged from the former Mannheim Institute of Public Health. The professorship addresses the central structural and systemic challenges of future primary medical care in research and teaching.

Future GP or primary medical care will combine digital formats with analogue care in multiprofessional teams to a much greater extent than today. This requires leaving the traditional model of the general practitioner’s single practice, for which there are now fewer and fewer followers, and rethinking, testing and implementing primary care as an integrated part or centre of community care.

The key is to focus on the patient or customer journey and to develop solutions based on people's needs. In this context, individual prevention and lifelong support of individuals in their living environments are becoming increasingly important for society. How this can be put into practice in everyday care using innovative digital solutions and the expanding knowledge about the opportunities of early prevention is the subject of research and teaching.

In teaching, we are creating an attractive offer for the early orientation of future doctors towards GP care. Students get involved as early as the second year of their studies, and we accompany them throughout the whole course of their studies, including experience in rural settings, and provide structured further and advanced training for specializing in general medicine in partnership with other institutions. One focus here is the promotion of multiprofessional cooperation and delegation to non-physician specialists.

In research, we mediate sustainable, hybrid analogue-digital solutions in the community in co-production between science, research and development, those providing treatment and those affected. We examine all elements of the treatment and support processes in a structured and evidence-based way to see how the benefits for patients can be optimised along the entire treatment pathway. We are convinced that the core of the art of healing, the personal and trust-based medical relationship between healer and patient, must be given appropriate space, focus and time again through new processes and structures.

In addition to testing and implementing new hybrid treatment pathways, our research also includes systematic economic exploration of cross-sectoral care chains and processes. Of particular benefit to the Division of General Medicine is its inclusion with the Centre for Preventive Medicine and Digital Health. This enables direct exchange and collaboration with basic clinical research on prevention as well as access to state-of-the-art application and development of digital solutions.