In the face of chronic disease, an ageing population and a shortage of trained staff, Europe urgently needs to devise and implement new delivery models that will make its healthcare systems sustainable in the future.
This will involve a range of public and private partners and investors, and a combination of bottom-up and top down approaches.
Partnerships between purchasers and providers of care services are fundamental to these changes. At the same time, incentives to restructuring, such as payment for results, outcomes-based payments and value-based contracting, are required.
A recent seminar involving the European Commission’s health, economics and research directorates and the European Central Bank, considered how de-risked funding provided by the European Fund for Strategic Investment could be applied to support the design and implementation of new models of healthcare.
“The way in which societies and economies function changes, with information and communications technology (ICT) gaining a more important role and with people expecting that more health and social care services will be offered online. The role of ICT is to support all three vertices of the triangle: infrastructure, medical technologies and care models”.