Do you work in healthcare as well ?
I’ve been amazed by the passion of healthcare professionals. How they every day again strive to deliver the best care for their patients, no matter what. Even though the burden is high, the workload is tremendous. We need to find other paths to improve healthcare, for them and for us.
It’s not about money alone, nor is it about legislation or policies. Over the past decades, I learned it is clearly about helping doctors and nurses to do what they are best in: caring for their patients. Taking away the burden of administrative procedures, fewer checklists, getting rid of the overkill of billing codes in EMRs and procedures nobody knows anymore why they were started in the first place.
If we would just help them to have some time to think a bit, to share their ideas and have someone pick those up and make them into a reality. Not every doctor or nurse is an innovator, but they do have the experience and knowledge needed to understand what’s needed. Listening and hearing what they have to say, working on tangible solutions on what they encounter on a daily base is key. Same goes of course for the needs of patients, family and informal care. From a human-centered perspective finding solutions that really matters.
We know what lies ahead: doubling healthcare demand within a stable or even lower budget will increase the burden even more. Shortage in healthcare already is staggering. And from what you’d learn from the news -as a teenager having to choose for a career- you would be crazy to set course for healthcare, so this is not going to be solved anytime soon.
On the other hand, change ís happening. In- and out of healthcare new players are trying to help and find a market in this environment that everyone at one point in his life will encounter: healthcare. Technology as a tool can bring new insights once we figured out the meaning of all that data, and being able to make executable information out of that. This won’t come easy though, we’ll face challenges like failure and even fraud as there were crooks in the past and there will be in the future of course. But if we had treated science and research based on incidents -as nowadays sometimes is done toward digital health- I really don’t know where medicine would be now.
There are challenges and opportunities at the horizon, let’s approach them with a positive attitude, and meanwhile find new pathways for validation in a way that suits the current societal demand. Then maybe we can pivot the current model a bit from healthcare into health(care) and next into health and make sure our healthcare professionals now and in the future will keep their passion and drive to stay in the most impactful branch there is.
If governments and payers no longer would approach healthcare as a cost but as an economic driver to approach society with passion in the way doctors and nurses do, it would change the equation completely.
Don’t you agree?
