This appeared last week:
Why Denmark is reducing hospitals while we are building more
Jill Margo
Updated Feb 19, 2019 — 3.48pm, first published at 3.03pm
Denmark has become a world leader in healthcare because, long before others, it realised the existing model was broken.
While other countries have been responding to growing demand by building more hospitals along traditional lines, the Danes have been reducing them.
In 1999, Denmark had 98 hospitals. Today it has 32.
"About 15 years ago, we realised the solution to these problems is not more hospitals but to think about how we can deliver healthcare in a different way," says Hans Erik Henriksen, CEO of Healthcare DENMARK. Janie Barrett
The Australian Financial Review Healthcare Summit in Sydney was told on Tuesday that against some domestic opposition, the Danish health system was radically transformed to make it financially sustainable for the multiple challenges ahead.
All first-world countries are facing the same challenges from an ageing population with more chronic disease among a fast-food generation with lifestyle issues that lead to chronic illness.
While this puts pressure on health budgets, so does the emergence of informed patients with larger expectations and research, technology and innovation proffering expensive new treatments.
……
He explained how his personal experience of the healthcare system had changed.
"Twenty years ago, if I went to the GP, typically he was sitting alone in his office. If I needed a blood test I'd be sent off to the hospital. Then I would get an appointment two weeks later to see him.
"Today GPs are in groups of four or five, with nurses and labs. I'll see a GP and then wait maybe 15 minutes before the lab takes my test. Two days later, I'll see the results in my electronic health record and with it, maybe, notes from the GP telling me what I have to do.
"As a patient, you spend less time travelling around the healthcare system. Many issues are solved through digitalisation and you feel the coherence of the system."
Denmark has embarked on a new $10.5 billion phase in healthcare reform to develop 16 new super specialised hospitals as the backbone of its future hospital structure.
This phase will see patients as active participants, taking more responsibility for becoming educated about their health, while the system works on making them feel heard.
Denmark's goldmine of electronic data about the population, going back 30 years, has given it a head start. So has the fact that its healthcare IT strategy is linked to the public sector IT strategy.
By November 2014, all Danes had to get an electronic mailbox because letters from public authorities would no longer be sent by snail mail.
Hendriksen says the elderly have rapidly become online users and one aim was for all Danes to have a doctor in their pocket. This is not smartphone access to Google but an instrument for their digital relationship with their GP.
Crucial to the success of the reform is trust. To date, he says, Denmark has the finest cyber security in the world.
Lots omitted from the middle of article.
I understand all the arguments about the size of countries etc. as enabling more dramatic and swifter change but Australia is divided into a series of bite size chunks (called States) where hospital systems could benefit from the sort of transformation that has been achieved here.
Sure there are barriers with payments, independence of GPs and so it goes but there are ways to work such issues out of the eyes are pointed firmly on the prize of a better, safer and more patient centric system.
Digital Health may be a part of such a transformation but the MyHealthRecord most surely is not!
At least there is some hope – but we need a little more political and ADHA vision!
David.
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