HealthCast Past Reports

The health systems of nations around the world may be unsustainable if unchanged over the next 15 years.

Globally, healthcare is threatened by a confluence of powerful trends — increasing demand, rising costs, uneven quality, misaligned incentives. If ignored, these trends will overwhelm health systems, creating massive financial burdens for businesses and governments as well as health problems for current and future generations.

During 2005, PricewaterhouseCoopers interviewed 700 health and business leaders in 27 countries about their health systems. While no one country has all of the answers, solutions to local problems can be found throughout the globe. Creating a sustainable strategy for the future depends on organizations’ abilities to learn and customize workable solutions within a societal context. PricewaterhouseCoopers has identified transferable lessons within seven key features that will create systems that are built to last.

Those seven key features are:

1. Quest for Common Ground: A vision and strategy is needed to balance public versus private interests in building an infrastructure and in providing basic health benefits within the context of societal priorities.
2. A Digital Backbone: Better use of technology and interoperable electronic networks accelerate integration, standardization, and knowledge transfer of administrative and clinical information.
3. Incentive Realignment: Incentive systems ensure and manage access to care while supporting accountability and responsibility for healthcare decisions.
4. Quality and Safety Standardization: Defined and enforced clinical standards establish mechanisms for accountability and enhanced transparency, thereby building consumer trust.
5. Strategic Resource Deployment: Resource allocation appropriately satisfies competing demands on systems to control costs while providing sufficient access to care for the most people.
6. Climate of Innovation: Innovation, technology and process changes are a means to continuously improve treatment, efficiency and outcomes.
7. Adaptable Delivery Roles and Structures: Flexible care settings and expanded clinical roles provide avenues for care that are centered on the needs of the patient.

HealthCast 2020 is the third in a series of global futures reports, which started in 1999.

How do healthcare organizations address issues that ranked high in importance or in which there were significant gaps?

They must begin now because the solutions will take a year or more to implement. The complexity of the healthcare system requires understanding the short-term trends and near-term solutions. The trends that healthcare organizations need to develop tactics for are:

Creating the Future Payor System

• Pay for Performance Will Imbed Reimbursement Methods.
• Payors Will Implement Self-service Tools to Lower Costs and Shift Responsibility.
• High-volume Users Will Be Targeted Through Systems that Combine Claims and Self-reported Health Assessments to Develop into Predictive Data.
• Single-platform Information and Data Warehousing Systems Will Help Payors Simplify, Integrate and Standardize amid the Industry’s Growing Complexity of Relationships.
• Public and Private Responsibilities to Patients Will Blur, Creating Opportunities and Dilemmas for Payors.

Creating the Future Hospital System

• Leading Hospitals Will Succeed by Targeting High-Margin, High-Volume and High-Quality Services.
• New Payor Models Will Require Providers to Strategically Price Services.
• Demands on Healthcare Workers Will Keep Turnover High.
• Aging Physical Structures Must Be Replaced or Renovated.
• Caregivers and Patients Will Demand Information at Their Fingertips.
• Physicians Will Want Better Support to Benefit from New Technologies.

HealthCast 2010: Smaller World, Bigger Expectations is a research-based examination of the road ahead for healthcare executives in the next decade.

To research the future, PricewaterhouseCoopers interviewed more than 50 thought leaders throughout the globe, and surveyed nearly 400 top healthcare executives about what they see ahead and what it means for them. The result is a report that examines Three Forces of Change (empowered consumer, e-business and genomics) and Four Future Trends (healthcare, financing changes, standardization, workforce retraining, and difficult choices).