Future of Healthcare Provision: Opportunities for Patient Engagement

Future Agenda, a non-for-profit UK-based foresight initiative, has just published a new 38-page paper entitled Future of Healthcare Provision: Opportunities for Patient Engagement.

Many believe the healthcare sector is ripe for a digital transformation. The escalating challenges it faces are putting increasing stress on the system just as better understanding of the possibilities of effective data sharing and analysis is emerging. A growing number of companies, academics, regulators and investors see that we are on the cusp of transition to a more integrated system. In the main this will be enabled by greater patient engagement around meaningful data and associated actions.

Based on discussions in 5 countries in 2016 – India, UK, Canada, Singapore and the US – this initial paper seeks to outline some of the key drivers of change taking place across healthcare that supports this transition. It discusses the sector’s three primary challenges of improving access, controlling costs and accelerating personalization. It then goes on to explore the importance of patient proximity, a focus that is increasingly enhanced by the role of data in all aspects of service delivery. Next it outlines three core constraints of interoperability, security and privacy that must be tackled if wider use of data is to be embraced fully. Particular opportunities are seen to lie in rethinking data ownership and in an open data ecosystem. T hen it poses key questions on issues around compliance and engagement such as how to bring the uninitiated into the fold. Finally, it concludes with a possible way forward, where patient-centricity and patient-owned data features as core focus areas.

Future Agenda recognises that given the multi-factored nature of this topic and the rapid emergence of new options, what they have summarised in this document is itself in flux. As such, over the next few months they will be sharing this more widely for additional feedback ahead of publication of an updated paper over the summer.