Medicine is becoming more and more preventive, and I see this trend very clearly in some of the projects we are analyzing. Today, healthcare is about healing, but there is a lot of space for entrepreneurs willing to change the focus of healthcare out of the acute-care hospital, back to doctors' offices, and then into schools, workplaces and the home.
The focus is as well shifting away from intervening in the acute phase of the disease toward early screening, detection, and of course, toward preventing the disease in the first place.
There’s plenty of room for innovation going upstream. Healthcare no longer takes place at the hospitals, it takes place everywhere around us.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
There is a big difference between spreading the places where healthcare is provided and expanding preventive medicine.
The first is mostly useful, the second is mostly dangerous.
Iona Heath, a GP from UK, have wrote a lot of papers about the issue.
There is one of then (that I strongly recommend) titled: Who need healthcare - the well or the sick?.
Amartya Sen has compared people living in Bihar, Kerala, and the United States.2 Bihar is the poorest state in India, and Kerala is the state that has invested most heavily in education and achieved the highest rates of literacy. Predictably, life expectancy is lowest in Bihar and highest in the United States, with Kerala's falling between the two but much closer to the United States. However, the rates of self reported illness are paradoxical: low in Bihar, where the low expectations of health are disturbing, and enormously high in the United States, which is equally disturbing but for different reasons. Kerala combines the greatest longevity and the highest rate of self reported illness of all the Indian states. It seems that the more people are exposed to doctors and contemporary health care, including the rhetoric of preventive care, the sicker they feel. What is happening to these different communities and why? What is the relation between perceived and observed health—between resignation, contentment, anxiety, and distress?
There will be a Seminar in primary care innovation in Madrid march 7. Iona Heath will be there. If you are interested in attending contact me.
Post a Comment