Future Health — Challenging the status quo

Is healthcare a difficult industry to disrupt? especially in a public provision set up like in Sweden? Is the current context worth challenging?

I believe if we do not challenge the status quo, we stop making things better, no matter how good they are now. In this story, I will elaborate on the current context of the healthcare system and the opportunities for improvement taking Sweden as an example.

Disrupting healthcare in Sweden calls for a balance of innovation that both enhances patient experiences and addresses the operational challenges faced by care providers. Let’s explore how to challenge the status quo in healthcare through technology.

Current context

Healthcare is part of social protection in Sweden, with predominantly tax-based financing and public provision. The goal is to provide good health and care on equal terms. The health expenditure in Sweden has been increasing consistently over the years and remains well above the EU average. Healthcare is delivered in different settings such as Primary and ambulatory care, Hospital care, Pharmaceutical care, Long-term care, and Dental care. Healthcare in Sweden is technologically advanced and there are many great things to talk about, but still, the patients experience high waiting times and the costs are rising for care providers. Read more at iris.who.int

Most of the health tech products are designed to cater to the current healthcare system. Therefore most of these products are care-provider-oriented rather than inhabitant-oriented.

Opportunities

Even though the healthcare system in Sweden is considered world-class and protects the inhabitants financially, the inhabitants still face difficulties regarding waiting times and accessibility. This opens up a market opportunity for health solution providers to bring health solutions directly to the people.

What do people want?

• We want to be involved and be in control of our health. When was the last time a clinician asked what matters to you rather than what is the matter with you? You go to a clinic, and they document about you and the decisions they made in a health information system and you have yet to learn what went in there. We wear health trackers the whole day but none of these are being used when we see a doctor. We want to be involved in the decisions about our health and we want care providers to understand what matters to us.
• We want to prevent getting sick. Treating a patient should not be the main focus of healthcare. The ideal scenario is if we can avoid getting sick, take precautions about our health to live a healthy life, and keep treatments as a last resort.
• We want things faster. We live in an era where everything is instant. We do not go to a shop to buy movies anymore. We have Netflix. When we don’t feel like cooking, we do not prefer going to a restaurant, we have Uber Eats and Foodora. Similarly, when we get sick, we don’t want to wait for a week to see a doctor or wait for months for a procedure.
• We prefer to avoid visiting clinics or hospitals to receive care. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us one thing, it would be that we don’t have to be in person to get most things done. We want to do everything from home — work from home, and shop from home. When we want to receive healthcare, we want to do that from home too.
• We need reliable information. We live in an information era where we learn things ourselves. Sometimes YouTube teaches us more than what we learned at school. When it comes to health, we wouldn’t want to rely on YouTubers or generic information but what is our alternative ? We need access to reliable personalised health knowledge and receive it fast.

When challenging the status quo in a complex domain, we would not be successful if we only focus on one segment. Since many things are working well in the current healthcare system, we need to understand what is not working well for care providers and try to solve them.

What do care providers want?

• We want to utilize available resources effectively and efficiently. In regional healthcare or if you take a hospital, they already have many resources in place — high-tech machines, skilled staff, and modern facilities. But still, there are high waiting times for patients, and the cost is rising. So the main problem might not be the lack of resources but the ability to utilize them optimally. If we take a scenario of making a booking for surgery, many resources go into this surgery — doctors, nurses, rooms, devices, etc. All these should be organised to book an appointment for a patient to undergo surgery. Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of making these bookings and also increasing the ability to quickly allocate these resources to a different patient if the appointment is cancelled can be a significant improvement.
• We want to reduce the cost of healthcare significantly. The expenditure on healthcare in Sweden has been increasing over time and it can be interpreted as a good thing. But what if better care can be provided at a lower cost? With improved resource utilization this can be solved to a great extent but another aspect is the costly procurement processes the care providers engage in to purchase systems and items. If this model can be disrupted and if the care providers can be enabled to solve their problems at a lower cost, the investments that directly solve the problems of the inhabitants can be increased. Another high-cost area is the time practitioners spend on administrative and documentation tasks compared to care-providing tasks. It was found that on average, 30–40% of a practitioner’s time is spent on administration and documentation.
• We want to have higher alignment and collaboration between healthcare providers and other actors to achieve better health outcomes. In a regional healthcare setting, even though the healthcare within the region can be well integrated, healthcare across regions is disconnected. Even if we take the collaboration within a region, there are scenarios where a patient moves between multiple clinics or hospitals but the information about the patients is stuck in individual systems that do not talk to each other. As the patient moves through the journey, information is created and most of this information does not travel with the patient and that can result in negative health outcomes. When it comes to healthcare, medical research plays a key role but the collaboration required between care providers, and researchers is not at the expected level. Researchers would need to wait for a long time to receive the data to perform the research and even if the data is received it would take a lot of effort to make the data meaningful. As healthcare is regional, sometimes the amount of data is also not enough. If this collaboration can be improved within regions and across regions, it can result in better research findings that can contribute back to healthcare and better health outcomes.

Developing products and services that challenge the status quo

Healthcare as a subscription: Amazon One Medical

Remote healthcare: Kry, Doktor.se

Manage personal health information: Apple Health, Google Health, Garmin Connect

Medical knowledge for patients: Leny AI

Deliver medication to home: Amazon Pharmacy, Apoteket

Reduce documentation workload for practitioners: Heidihealth

Faster access to new knowledge for practitioners: Leny AI, IBM Watson Healthcare Assistant

Health data platforms for Care Providers to develop in-house solutions: Cambio Platform, Better Platform

AI models designed for healthcare: MedLM

Process automation solutions

What now?

If we want to disrupt healthcare and be the frontrunners of the new health revolution, we need to think outside the box and beyond the current healthcare system.

If you cater to the inhabitants (B2C), bring faster and more accessible healthcare to people and help them be more proactive about their health. Provide solutions where people will be in control of their health and be involved in their care.

If you cater to the care providers (B2B), help them reduce costs by better resource utilization, and help them align and collaborate with others to provide the best care to the people. Bring solutions that can make life easier for the practitioners and take the administration and documentation workload off their shoulders.

Together we can make healthcare better for everyone. Keep challenging the status quo.