October 31, 2011
New research on health care spending recommends transformative changes for fiscal sustainability and improved quality of care.
As Canadian healthcare spending continues to skyrocket, the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto has released a blueprint for transformative changes to the healthcare system that could reduce costs, improve access and improve quality in a manner consistent with the Canada Health Act.
“The federal government is paying a diminishing share of Canadian healthcare spending, despite federal commitments to increase the Canada Health Transfer. Provinces will need to find innovative ways to bring down costs. This report provides a new framework for thinking about our healthcare system,” says Matthew Mendelsohn, Director of the Mowat Centre.
“We can bring down healthcare spending while improving access and quality so long as we treat healthcare as the high tech industry it is, recover some of the productivity gains that result from our previous investments and constantly use innovation,” says Will Falk, Executive Fellow in Residence at the Mowat Centre and the report’s lead author.
“Innovative service delivery models and new technology have already begun to lower costs. The next step will be to turn those lower costs into lower spending and to do so in a way that continues to improve quality and access to care,” he adds.
The report recommends five significant changes:
• Modernize the organization of hospitals, with academic centres focused on diagnostic work-ups, specialty clinics providing routine procedures efficiently and accessibly, and networks of care that monitor patient well-being
• Embrace the ‘‘virtualization’ of many existing services that are currently only delivered in person
• Widely deploy digitization by reforming agencies so that they can respond to technological change more quickly and by providing more IT funding directly to providers
• Encourage organic governance evolution without undertaking wholesale restructuring, and
• Reform the way health services are purchased. The report is part of the Shifting Gears Series on the transformation of public services and was supported financially by KPMG.
“Governments around the world are looking at new public service delivery models in healthcare,” said Georgina Black, partner with KPMG.
“It is part of our mission to better understand these trends and identify the options most likely to contribute to fiscal sustainability within healthcare systems.”
