Demographic change, social changes and a changing entitlement mentality represent three of the future challenges to the German health system.

Health services research seeks to achieve an improvement in the health services, resulting in the best possible outcome for patients. This field of research thus acts as an interface between clinical, socioeconomic and economic research.

The DZL has also adopted this topic. At BREATH, in cooperation with other DZL partners, research to improve patient health care is predominantly carried out in the disease areas of end-stage lung disease (ELD) and COPD.