The COVID-19 pandemic is placing enormous strain on the global health care sector’s workforce, infrastructure, and supply chain, and exposing social inequities in health and care. COVID-19 is also accelerating change across the ecosystem and forcing public and private health systems to adapt and innovate in a short period.

Overview

A number of foundational shifts are arising from and being exacerbated by COVID-19’s spread. Examples include consumers’ increasing involvement in health care decision-making; the rapid adoption of virtual health and other digital innovations; the push for interoperable data and data analytics use; and unprecedented public-private collaborations in vaccine and therapeutics development. Amid these dynamics, governments, health care providers, payers, and other stakeholders around the globe are being challenged to quickly pivot, adapt, and innovate. In our 2021 Global Health Care Outlook, we look in detail at six issues driving change in the health care sector and present questions and actions health leaders should consider in the coming year. How stakeholders analyze, understand, and respond to these issues will shape their ability to navigate from recovering to thriving in the post-pandemic “new normal” and advance their journey along the path to the Future of Health.

Consumers and the human experience

Consumers are driving—and accelerating—the pace of change in health care. Their needs and goals are driving innovation in health-related products, services, and tools. Their preferences are driving the development of digitally enabled, on-demand, and seamlessly connected clinician-patient interactions. Their demands are driving the transition to patient-centric care delivery across geographies and socio-economic groups. And their expectations are driving industry stakeholders to elevate a transactional patient/customer health care encounter into a holistic human health experience.

Key Takeaways

• Every person’s health journey is different. Health care organizations should acknowledge this fact and tune their services to elevate each encounter into a personalized health experience.
• Deploying new digital tools and services has the potential to increase consumer satisfaction, improve medication adherence, and help consumers track and monitor their health.
• While consumers are more willing to share their data, health care organizations should ensure that the data serves consumers’ needs through adequate interoperability between the organizations that own or store the data.
• To maintain or even re-earn the trust of consumers, organizations should demonstrate reliability, transparency, and most importantly, a sense of empathy in how they operate.

Global health care sector issues in 2021

https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/life-sciences-and-healthcare/articles/global-health-care-sector-outlook.html