One of the alarming trends Transform Global Health (TGH) has found is the significant growth year on year for implementing and managing Electronic Health Records (EHR) with the global expenditure on EHR projected to exceed $33.4 Billion by 2025. And this is for an EHR model that doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting patient and physician expectations.
TGH is implementing the Universal Health Information Network (UNHIN) to combat this trend. The UNHIN will apply blockchain and decentralized computing to connect people across the world and create a health information network that doesn’t exist today, while removing the expenditure on EHR via a self-governed, community driven, incentivized network.
Please review the UNHIN and share your thoughts and questions. Also, do you feel that having a global network such as the UNHIN can reduce healthcare expenditures in other areas, for example by reducing duplicative medical testing, reducing medical errors, implementing patient centered models for healthcare, and enabling transformative models of healthcare tourism where people can travel to get lower cost healthcare more effectively?
According to a report published by McKinsey, over the past 50 years, spending on health care has consistently outpaced broader economic growth. What will happen if that trend persists? For almost 50 years, healthcare spending has grown by 2 percentage points in excess of GDP growth across all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). countries. As a result, health care has become a much bigger part of most of these economies.
It is set to become bigger still. If current trends persist to 2050, most OECD countries will spend more than a fifth of GDP on health care. By 2080 Switzerland and the United States will devote more than half of GDP to it—and by 2100 most other OECD countries will reach this level of spending. While such a scenario is difficult to conceive, observers in 1960 would have viewed as far-fetched any forecast that in 40 years Western Europe would spend about 9 percent of GDP on health care. Of course, that prediction came true.
Health care leaders fervently hope that the projections are off the mark. What will have to change to prevent health care from devouring half of a national economy? Even if the excess growth of health care spending over GDP is somehow cut in half, health care will by 2100 be the world’s largest economic sector—and in many countries, the largest economic problem.
What can we do to combat this issue, how can we make healthcare affordable so that advanced nations do not run into significant economic issues, and developing nations are able to develop their much-needed healthcare infrastructure and services? How can we truly transform healthcare systems and the delivery of healthcare services, which is so essential to the continued progress of humanity.
According to a report published by McKinsey, over the past 50 years, spending on health care has consistently outpaced broader economic growth. What will happen if that trend persists? For almost 50 years, healthcare spending has grown by 2 percentage points in excess of GDP growth across all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). countries. As a result, health care has become a much bigger part of most of these economies.
It is set to become bigger still. If current trends persist to 2050, most OECD countries will spend more than a fifth of GDP on health care. By 2080 Switzerland and the United States will devote more than half of GDP to it—and by 2100 most other OECD countries will reach this level of spending. While such a scenario is difficult to conceive, observers in 1960 would have viewed as far-fetched any forecast that in 40 years Western Europe would spend about 9 percent of GDP on health care. Of course, that prediction came true.
Health care leaders fervently hope that the projections are off the mark. What will have to change to prevent health care from devouring half of a national economy? Even if the excess growth of health care spending over GDP is somehow cut in half, health care will by 2100 be the world’s largest economic sector—and in many countries, the largest economic problem.
What can we do to combat this issue, how can we make healthcare affordable so that advanced nations do not run into significant economic issues, and developing nations are able to develop their much-needed healthcare infrastructure and services? How can we truly transform healthcare systems and the delivery of healthcare services, which is so essential to the continued progress of humanity.
