29-July-2024
Jan Denecker claims that we’ve made great progress in the medical world with innovations; however, we’ve also made it complex and expensive. The combined spending of the USA and the EU amounts to over $4 trillion annually. The USA has doubled its spending on healthcare in the last 20 years, but that spending didn’t double the healthcare improvement. Life expectancy, for instance, only increased about 3 years. The need for healthcare will only increase with our aging population. We need to change our mindset to do more with less, that is if we want to keep our healthcare system affordable. There are many ways to change that, but Denecker believes there are three that apply to healthcare. Looking for alternatives that are cheaper but just as effective is the first way. A doctor working in Pune, India, uses scalp clips when performing surgeries. This tool is quite expensive and hard to find in India, so as an alternative, he started using binder clips. This alternate option costs less than a tenth of that of a scalp clip, but it still works just as well. Keeping it simple is another good way to achieve our goal. Many medical procedures are overly complex and we need to simplify our mechanisms. An infant incubator costs $10,000 which most hospitals in India can’t afford. What does India do? They redesign the entire device. They find simple solutions that make the device less costly. They replaced the switches with a control panel and made the device easier to operate in challenging environments. The new cost after all these changes? $3,000. This new device innovated in Bangalore is now sold in over 80 countries. A third step to changing our mindset in healthcare is to appreciate what’s right in front of us. There are many technologies being used in the developed world, but aren’t being fully utilized in healthcare. Who knows what benefits can spring from these technologies, barcodes for example? The many solutions we have yet to discover may already be hidden in plain sight. We need to take action following these three steps to keep up equity in healthcare and to do more with less.