Private sector funding could help cut rising public healthcare costs
A patient is treated at the Coast Provincial General Hospital. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
Unless new approaches on how we medics can deliver quality care at affordable cost are found, health budgets for most citizens will continuously grow at the expense of their other budgeted items.
The ever spiralling cost of delivering healthcare is a cause of concern for patients, governments and funders of medical schemes.
Unless new approaches on how we medics can deliver quality care at affordable cost are found, health budgets for most citizens will continuously grow at the expense of their other budgeted items. As it stands the annual increase of about 10 per cent is higher than most people’s pay rises.
What is of concern though is that in all this, we are unable to stop the tide despite advances in technology, increasing human resource capacity and skill as well as improved logistics.
As a doctor and healthcare manager, one way would be to institute research to find out why this is happening. Research on cost versus benefit analysis, efficiency and utility of resources and interventional outcome reviews are a great way to go about this.
Unfortunately like most other academic areas, evidence based studies on healthcare financing and costing are missing.
In my recent search of theses available online and in university libraries for work done by graduates from local medical and business schools found that the majority of publications seemed to dwell on epidemiology and medical aspects of patient care.
Yet the financial implications are perhaps just as important a component.
The increasing pool of public health, hospital and healthcare management medics means, it is time such an initiative is spearheaded to guide the industry and policymakers.
The dearth of our research and publications is based on poor funding. The main reason is that as non-patentable research ownership of the findings is impossible and as such monetising the findings impractical.
Once the findings are out, everyone benefits from them even though they did not fund it. For this reason in a competing cluster, no one is willing to fund such a study or research work.
But the financing side is not the only problem. Our local private sector has not realised the importance of such studies.
A colleague recalls the difficulty in convincing motor vehicle manufacturers to fund his graduate student’s research project on outcomes of ambulance service referral delays.
Yet such work could easily influence uptake of such services — policy is influenced by data and evidence based findings.
But there is a solution to this. The private sector is there to make money and anyone who can convince them how they will benefit stands to have their research work funded.
In particular an evaluation of the inter-hospital service charges and the outcomes could help consumers pin a reason on their decisions to use a service, for instance. The use of branded medication versus generics is also one concern area for major insurance companies.
Other popular areas focus on themes such as competition amongst doctors and hospitals. Are poly practice financial and clinical rewards better than individual practices?
Similarly, is it financially rewarding to have 12 MRI scans in a 5km radius each operating at 55 per cent efficiency or better to relocate three and have all operate at 95 per cent efficiency and in such a case what would be the marginal benefits or challenges incurred?
In a previous article I also mentioned the efficiency of resource pooling like ambulance services vis-à-vis idle-time, needed daily revenue generation and the implication to the users of such vehicles.
Would pooling ambulances and emergency vehicles by hospitals lower their patients’ overhead costs and their operational ones?
Data on innovative business models is what we need.
