Health care is a complex system. It encompasses hospitals, medical practices, community health centers, public mental health institutions and patient advocacy organizations – just to name a few.
Many people hold different views about how healthcare should be provided. Some believe it should be a right that the government has an ethical obligation to provide for everyone, while others argue for leaving it up to the free market.
What Is It?
Healthcare refers to a system of health services that offer treatment for disease, injury or illness. This encompasses both the clinical science and infrastructure necessary for such delivery as well as the businesses responsible for running it.
Some consider health care a social good or moral right that the government should provide to everyone, so everyone has access without worry of financial strain. Others view it as an essential and desirable part of life – like roads and education – which should be distributed fairly so no one gets left behind.
In the United States, health care is provided through a partnership between public and private, for-profit and nonprofit insurers and providers. The federal government funds programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), along with other assistance for low income people and veterans.
The Ecosystem
Healthcare ecosystems are composed of capabilities and services that link together value chain participants (customers, suppliers, platform and service providers) through a common commercial model and virtual data backbone in order to create improved and efficient consumer and stakeholder experiences.
Realizing these capabilities and services necessitates an infrastructure layer with efficient data capture, curation, management, storage, and interoperability to create a common data set upon which ecosystems can operate. Subsequently, an intelligence layer transforms raw data elements into consumable insights that empower ecosystem participants to make wiser decisions.
Finally, an engagement layer is necessary to create an optimal experience for stakeholders who provide services and offerings within the ecosystem. To accomplish this goal, a shared digital platform must be established that facilitates engagement with carefully curated capabilities and services.
Ecosystem curators and stakeholders offering point solutions must ensure their technologies, services, and capabilities are aligned with ecosystem workflows and journeys, build on existing behaviors, and link to incentives. Furthermore, they must decide if their offerings fit within or across topical domains as this requires technical flexibility as well as APIs that interface with other ecosystem participants, particularly at the core infrastructure and intelligence layers.
The Free Market
Americans have been debating the pros and cons of a free market approach to health care for decades. Recently, costs have continued to rise while access to services has diminished.
Furthermore, the United States spends significantly more on health care than many other advanced economies. For instance, in 2017, it spent about 17 percent of its GDP on healthcare compared to only 11 percent in Germany and 9 percent in the United Kingdom (WHO).
Our current system fails to ensure price transparency, leading to wide differences between hospitals and across places – even within one institution. This can lead to patients being overtreated or paying for unnecessary items.
The Future
Recently, the healthcare system and pharmaceutical industry have undergone unprecedented disruptions – technological, regulatory, and socioeconomic in nature.
Therefore, the future of healthcare will be driven by a convergence between health care, technology and retail/consumer industries. Therefore, leaders across these sectors must collaborate in order to deliver an integrated patient experience.
Health administrators today and in the future must stay abreast of these industries to provide informed recommendations to staff members and guide their organizations as these changes continue.
A major trend in healthcare technology is the growth of patients as the ultimate consumer, necessitating them to be empowered in their own care. To meet this need, healthcare technology innovations must focus on providing easy patient access, monitoring and research.