The challenge of reinventing healthcare
The pandemic that has erupted from the Covid-19 spread has led to a deeper look at the healthcare sector as a whole, a case of very rare recurrence, despite the sector being one of the most relevant pillars of the functioning of developed economies. And it has done so on a very delicate context: with healthcare staff nearing over exhaustion, without IPE’s and hospitals close to full occupation.
As it is managed to get consistent improvements and the healthcare sector moves towards stability, it will be presented to everyone an unprecedented opportunity to address some of the challenges that the sector, both public and private, faces ahead. It is an opportunity not to be missed. It is the moment to create a debate – not only among the medical-scientific community, but also for the whole society and in the core of our political institutions – that help in the implementation of new solutions and tools that guarantee that we get to a new reality in which patients and professionals of the sector may feel safer.
To move along this path is not an easy task, as we still have to remain vigilant to the advent of a new outbreak, but it is a good time to pave the way to the discussions about the challenges of a new healthcare system when the crisis is behind us.
McKinsey and Company has recently published an interesting article “From “wartime” to “peacetime”: Five stages for healthcare institutions in the battle against COVID-19”, in which it states that the healthcare sector face an unprecedented multifaceted challenge: to fight the ongoing crisis, while dealing with issues similar to the ones faced by other sectors on a global basis, such as protecting its staff and manage the impact of the economic crisis that lies further down the road.
Among the different steps presented in the article it is mentioned the capacity of the sector leaders to solve the problem taking advantage of all of the knowledge interconnected around this disease, to show resiliency to face the economic impact that Covid19 will cause on the healthcare sector, the ability of the sector to restart its research projects once the height of the crisis is past, the potential to reinvent healthcare services with a safer and of higher quality service to patients and the power to reorganize the healthcare of the future with the view of new global risks.
Along the same lines that were seen on the new pattern of collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry, the biotech sector, public and private institutions, and governmental agencies to fight a common enemy, a unique opportunity is presented to us to rethink and reinvent the healthcare sector and to adapt it to the new challenges ahead of us. This is the time to do it.
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