Over the last century, we've seen amazing advancements in
health care for the population worldwide.
However, we have now reached a tipping point in terms of the
cost of health care and the provisions we have to deliver
it.
Looking forward, we are seeing a rise from demographic
challenges.
For example, our over 85-year-old group will increase
by 100% over the next 20 years.
In addition, we have workforce deficits. WHO estimates a 10
million deficit by 2030 in the number of staff we have
worldwide.
This is leading to poor outcomes in care.
We're already seeing a tenfold difference in maternal mortality
across all OECD countries and in many of the long-term conditions
we're seeing a flattening off of healthy life years.
So what to do about it?
Well, we need to reimagine health care because we cannot
continue to deliver it in the same way.
And digital is going to be a key element in how we can transform
these pathways.
There are already many examples in the world of where digital is
delivering benefits.
Many of the areas where we've seen solutions develop, for
example in COVID, where telehealth expanded rapidly,
have not managed to stay at scale and shrunk back.
This is because of issues both from a health care physician
side in using these tools, but also from a patient side finding
them not as easy to access as we would have imagined.
To solve this it's going to take working across both governments
and private providers together to come up with solutions that
address whole pathways, not just point solutions.
We're starting to see some of that also developing, but it
will require a change in incentives as well as the data
that we're collecting, how it's analyzed and taking a very
consumer centric approach to it
to do this. We can then think about how we can fully digitize
the front end and augment the back end of health care to
provide a new way to deliver care for the future.