The future of healthcare #4 - Focus on efficient outcomes

Efficiency needs to connect with the positive human impact of treatments and services

Healthcare systems are under considerable strain from a variety of sources.  A key outcome of this is that systems now need to deliver even more from the limited finances available.  This is what lies behind the fourth in our ‘Forces of Change’ series – the focus on value and efficiency. 

This is a really important area to understand as it is based on the measurement of treatments and services against the idea of improvements in ‘positive health outcomes’.  While this looks quite straightforward on the surface, and is likely to link to a cost benefit ratio using traditional clinical markers of disease – it needs to be much more complicated in reality when we consider the true human impact of health problems on patients, carers and the wider community. 

It’s really important that we do due diligence in this regard and consider the whole picture and establish where benefit and ‘value’ might be found for the lives of the people that matter – as well as the people looking after health budgets. 

As a result, it’s an area where smart ethnographic research such as lifelogging (combined with data analysis and more traditional interviewing) can give us a real insight into the true burden of a condition lies and what benefits have real value and are worth including in the overall value equation.  It’s so important that these human benefits are kept on the agenda to ensure that limited resources don’t just lead to a race to the bottom in an oversimplified attempt to make budgets go further.

Lifelogging ethnography using wearable tech can take us closer to the impact of disease and the valuable benefits that treatments can bring to people’s lives