Elsevier’s “Future of Healthcare Series” took place in June and consisted of a 5-week thought-leadership webinar programme featuring a line-up of healthcare practitioners from around the world. Throughout the event speakers showcased how hospital systems have pivoted digitally to transform their operation, care, and service models in response to the current pandemic to improve healthcare delivery for a more sustainable future.
This report summarises the key learnings from the sessions and explores the challenges countries are facing as they navigate their way through a second wave of infections and contemplate opening up their locked boarders. Additionally, it focuses on opportunities arising from the COVID-19 pandemic that will impact the future of our healthcare systems.
The pandemic has fast-tracked care out of hospitals and into the community
Prior to the global pandemic, there was a growing understanding that reactive hospital-based models of healthcare were unsustainable and would soon be unfit to meet the growing demands associated with increased life expectancies. However, in response to COVID-19, driven by the need to reduce viral transmission for patients and providers alike, in many parts of the world, health care delivery has accelerated in its shift from a ‘sickness service’ to a more preventive health or ‘health and well-being service’.
This, however, has not been an easy transition. Around the world, healthcare systems are facing a common set of challenges with a particular concern at present being how efficiently and effectively they can redesign their services away from a model of reactive acute care towards a more proactive model. The NHS, like other healthcare systems, is facing challenges arising from shifting patient needs, novel technologies and the ever increasing need to manage costs. To address these challenges, hospitals will need to innovate and transform their models of service delivery.
Some healthcare organisations have already been able to show that the recent drive to digital can deliver benefits for patient care, defining better future care models. James Bird, CNIO at Imperial College, recently stated that Imperial facilitated a decade of healthcare transformation in weeks, with “60% of outpatients transitioning to virtual care a week after the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Many healthcare providers are also realising the importance, and associated benefits, of involving patients as care partners as they find ways to transfer more ownership of care outcomes to patients themselves. De-hospitalizing technology to bring care closer to patients. Digital health and medical technologies, including healthcare personalisation delivery via smartphones and online consultation are shifting the perception from disease management to healthy lifestyle management.
Consumer expectations are rising and digital transformation in healthcare is being fed by consumers in other industries. Health Records on iPhones have recently been made available in the UK bringing together hospitals, clinics, and the existing Health app to provide a fuller snapshot of health. This allows users to see a central view of their allergies, conditions, immunisations, lab results, medications, procedures, and vitals across multiple institutions. It also allows users to be notified when their data is updated allowing the general public to prioritise and keep informed on their health.
Providing quality care and ensuring safety
As we look towards using new technology solutions during a healthcare crisis, we must not lose sight of the requirement to provide quality care and patient safety. These two factors are of utmost importance, especially in a pandemic when the situation is evolving by the minute. Innovation should not be done at the expense of the patients’ safety and well-being. We need to collect and analyse the right data to find the best balance between innovation and patient safety.
A post event survey highlighted that 85 percent of the attendees of the Future of Healthcare webinar series indicated that a safety and health management systems need to be established to ensure clinical safety in hospitals, post COVID-19.
Sustaining the growth of new models of care
The current health emergency has encouraged us to adopt innovation and digitisation in healthcare at a rapid pace. The lasting result will hopefully be in an improvement in healthcare delivery, with a shift towards community-based care.
To sustain such system alterations healthcare providers need to continue to invest in sustainable business models, patient safety and outcome measurements, data integration with existing workflows as well as training for staff and patients. As digital solutions within healthcare are becoming more common and necessary in this future state of digital health, we need to take into consideration patient safety and quality care. We do not need more digital technology; we need innovation that is defined to meet the challenges of our new collective reality.
COVID-19 has provided a platform for change allowing healthcare systems to revolutionise their model of care delivery for the future. It will take time and collective effort to re-design and deliver approaches that can sustainably promote health and resilience. Sustaining such models will require new ways of working and more sophisticated funding mechanisms to incentivise and reward high-quality, productive care. This will result in the development of solutions that will impact patient care and are trusted by the people that will benefit from them the most.