Future Health Index - a window on healthcare's challenges

Citizens and healthcare professionals would like healthcare to become more integrated and collaborative.

This is one of the key findings of the 2017 Future Health Index (FHI), launched today, a comprehensive and thought-provoking survey of more than 33,000 healthcare professionals, insurers and citizens across 19 countries worldwide.

The study highlights where our industry is on the road to better health outcomes and the provision of lower cost care – in essence, the future of healthcare.

According to the study, nearly three-quarters of healthcare professionals (73%) and citizens (72%) say connected care technology is important for improving the prevention of medical issues.

Connected care technologies can play a key role in helping empower people to manage their own health and the data they produce augments that collected in clinics and hospitals. Of course, we must still count on specialists to help interpret this data wherever appropriate. And connected care technologies can improve collaboration between care givers, reduce mistakes and waste in delivering care to patients.

We in Philips believe we need to make use of every data source, from devices at home to the most advanced artificial intelligence systems in hospitals with deep learning capabilities, to make more complete sense of what’s going on in the human body and support effective, coordinated care delivery.

Data analytics already offers new ways to identify emerging health trends and gauge and improve the quality of healthcare outcomes – as is already evident in some segments of the healthcare sector.

In the United States, for example, research from McKinsey estimates Kaiser Permanente’s implementation of the HealthConnect data exchange system produced $1 billion in savings, and that widespread adoption of big data applications could help reduce national healthcare spending by up to $450 billion. These are crucial advances.

Creating a healthcare system fit for the 21st century is an undeniably complicated process and I believe the FHI research provides compelling insights on our common journey. Wherever you are in the world, the insights uncovered in the report can stimulate the kind of thinking – and actions – required to make our healthcare systems deliver better outcomes at lower cost and put people where they belong – right at the heart of care.

For more findings from the FHI, also check out this article from Jan Kimpen, Philips Chief Medical Officer, on better prevention and the future of healthcare.