Editor's note: This year, we’re delighted to have Bupa, the global health and care company, as a partner at our upcoming Annual Forum in Washington, D.C. Bupa provides health insurance and medical subscription products, runs care homes, retirement and care villages as well as primary care, diagnostic and wellness centres, hospitals and dental clinics. In this blog, Bupa’s Dr. Niti Pall, outlines why, with the world’s healthcare systems under ever increasing strain and a rapidly changing consumer landscape, the time is ripe to create new healthcare models fit for the future.
During my lifetime, I’ve seen enormous progress in tackling some of the world’s healthcare challenges from huge improvements in maternal and child mortality to progress in reducing the incidence of killer diseases such as Polio and TB. But while this is a record of which we should all be proud, there are new and mounting challenges: ageing populations, a rising burden of chronic disease, a shortage of medical professionals and inflation-busting healthcare costs, to name a few.
As an international health and care business with over 70 years’ experience and almost 30 million customers, we have insight into some of how these challenges are playing out. What we see is that traditional, curative, infrastructure-intensive approach to healthcare is inadequate at best and a tragedy as worst. Countries are becoming less able to deliver to the needs and expectations of their people who are increasingly demanding convenient access to quality, caring healthcare without the heavy financial burden that usually comes attached.
We need to take a new path – one that puts the patient rather than the doctor or the facility at the centre of healthcare. Some innovators have already acknowledged this by democratising medical knowledge, through better use and management of data, maximising the use of technology and creating more efficient systems and patient pathways.
At Bupa, we’re proud of our clinical credentials, our infrastructure and our processes that enable us to strive for maximum value from healthcare spending while putting health outcomes at the forefront of decision making. But we believe that by collaborating with innovators across the world, we can bring about new, better models of healthcare and deliver our vision of a new ‘front door’ to health with technology at its heart. We want to empower people to keep well, support them through illness and enable them to access medical services in a way that is both financially sustainable for the individual and commercially viable for the service provider.
We are excited about the possibilities for a step change in the way healthcare is consumed and delivered and to overcome some of the world’s toughest healthcare challenges. Bupa is a company without shareholders and driven by our purpose - longer, healthier, happier lives. We want to join together with the world’s best innovators to create the future of healthcare and deliver on this commitment.
You can meet Niti and some of her team from Bupa at our upcoming Annual Forum,this April 4th and 5th in Washington, D.C. For more information about this invitation-only event, contact Jenny Cook at Jennifer.cook@duke.edu