 All over the world, healthcare faces major challenges. In both developed and developing nations, the goal of providing patients access to affordable and available care of good quality is often far from being met. However, the development and diffusion of healthcare information technologies have the power to transform our healthcare systems making them more affordable, more available and of higher quality.
We are all affected by worldwide healthcare problems such as the prevention and control of global diseases. In developing countries, increasing access to healthcare is a dramatic challenge that needs urgent solutions. We simply must make care available to a growing and increasingly demanding population.
In the developed world, there is a rising demand for better quality of healthcare that is affordable. Informed patients want more personalized healthcare solutions and more emphasis on prevention and follow-up care. They are demanding a transparent healthcare system and better outcomes. As a result, both the Bush administration and governments in Europe worry about the rapidly rising costs and the inefficiencies in our healthcare systems.
Healthcare companies, governments, care providers and even patient-consumers must work together to increase the quality and cost-efficiency of healthcare systems, while also enhancing the overall value that those systems delivers to society. These are difficult challenges that have resulted in ongoing intense debates in Europe and the United States.
To satisfy the new demands in healthcare, we must bring down the barriers that still separate the various parties in the care cycle. Using healthcare information technologies to integrate solutions across the cycle will achieve higher quality healthcare at an affordable price.
The healthcare industry should focus on technologies that can connect all stages of the care cycle, to help with prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment and distance care. This will foster efficient, reliable and timely communication between labs, hospitals, general practitioners, pharmacists and insurance companies. These kinds of eHealth technology solutions simply mean better and quicker care across the entire cycle, ensuring that vital information is instantly available where and when needed.
While helping to create a holistic view of patient care, technology can also keep healthcare costs under control. There is no trade-off between quality and costs: good healthcare provides society with tremendous human and financial benefits. Just think of all the workdays lost due to our slow, inefficient healthcare systems.
Telemonitoring that enables patients to be monitored remotely in the comfort of their homes is just one solution to this ongoing societal problem. Philips is already active in this area through pilot projects in the United States and The Netherlands called “Motiva” that allow remote monitoring of patients via interactive broadband channels.
But no company can do it alone. Private sector alliances across boundaries in the care cycle are essential if we want to maximize innovation and optimize its effects for both the patient and the healthcare professional. For example, Philips is part of a non-profit organization called the Continua Health Alliance, announced in June, which will work to make high technology healthcare tools work together more cohesively.
Governments must also participate. In the U.S., for example, the federal government is the single largest payer of healthcare services via Medicare, so must actively collaborate with the private sector and academia to improve healthcare delivery via sensible policies that recognize the care cycle and the role that technology can play in improving it.
Together, we can dramatically change the care cycle. Whether we are talking about liver cancer, strokes or heart attacks, technology is helping us to move towards very early detection of risk factors and symptoms. Combining these improvements with new healthcare information technologies can both further improve diagnosis and treatment, and introduce efficiencies into the system that save money. This opens the door to improving the quality of life for patients , the quality of delivery for professionals, and controlling costs for payers.
Healthcare is about improving people’s lives at the most basic and important level. At the same time, healthcare promises to be a tremendous locomotive for economic growth on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. In win-win partnerships, the profitable growth of healthcare companies is intrinsically linked to higher quality, lower costs and higher patient satisfaction in the services delivered by the healthcare providers. I am confident that over the next few years, everyone that is part of the care cycle will enter into many more of these mutually beneficial business relations – continued innovation in healthcare will depend on it.
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