New paper on health system resilience gives priorities to prepare for the next crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses and inequalities across all health systems. While the crisis is not yet over, its lessons are already clear: we need to build more resilient health systems better prepared for future emergencies –  shocks brought on by climate change, conflict or a pandemic – while still balancing the needs of a growing and ageing population. A more distributed healthcare model will support future health system resilience. But various vital components need to be in place to enable this vision. In a new paper Philips sets out its contribution and ideas as a member of the WEF Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience (PHSSR). The paper is giving five priorities to prepare for the future.

Priority 1: Technology and service delivery focuses on reimagines the hospital: from being the central provider of care to a network, harnessing mobile, community and local facilities, and enabled by telemedicine and digital technologies. This reduces the distance between care provider and patient and places elective care and diagnostic facilities within easy reach of those who need them.

Priority 2: Governance shares a key lesson and real-world examples from the pandemic that where data infrastructures were open and accessible, health systems could use their digital capability to respond faster.

Priority 3: Healthcare workforce. The third priority in the new paper explains the need for an adaptive workforce. To decrease the pressure on the existing workforce a shift away from disease-centered care delivery systems is needed towards value-based and patient-centric care models, placing the healthcare worker in a more dynamic culture of flexibility and continuous learning.

Priority 4: Data innovation covers the need for open standards ensuring healthcare data is in a format that can be shared effortlessly, transparently, and securely.This should be accompanied by robust standards and policies that govern data usage are needed, both for the existing management of data but also data-intensive technologies like AI. Patients must feel confident that their information is secure and can only be accessed with their consent or authorization.

Priority 5: Finance. Funds must be spent wisely to ensure the health systems’ resilience. Health systems need to pivot away from healthcare models that still focus more on treating sickness than on healthy living and prevention.

To achieve financial resilience health systems can focus on reducing the practices which lead to waste. A key component in reshaping the financing of healthcare is exploring strategic partnerships between healthcare providers and technology vendors.

To learn more, you can download the paper here.