Technology can cure healthcare’s inflation sickness

Digitisation and new technologies must be used to counter the spiralling and unsustainable cost of healthcare, say experts.

Medical care budgets around the world soared 6.8% in 2020 against a global inflation rate of just 2.4%, according to insurance brokerage and advisory company Willis Towers Watson.

This highlights a longstanding problem for many first world countries. For instance, the UK’s average annual healthcare expenditure increase since 1958/59 has been 3.9%, consistently higher than its own national and the global inflation average over those years.

Technology can cure healthcare’s inflation sickness

And the Office for National statistics estimates £269 billion was spent on UK healthcare in 2020 – 20% more than 2019.

The World Nano Foundation (WNF), a not-for-profit organisation that supports commercialising nanoscale technology including nanomedicines, says the issue must be addressed:

"Current operation of global healthcare is simply not sustainable,” said WNF co-founder Paul Sheedy. “Our centralised model uses hospitals to treat almost every ailment or condition, but patients should only come to hospital when they cannot be treated and monitored at home. This is what has fuelled this above-inflation high-cost system and incidentally, also exacerbated the COVID-19 infection rate.

"And developing countries are trying to copy these costly and inefficient systems too, leading to poorer quality of care and disease infection risk.”

Instead, he called for a decentralised and sustainable model, utilising digitisation and technology:

"Last year's pandemic showed that we already had the technology to diagnose and treat patients at home through telemedicine, while cost-effective remote health monitoring devices for multiple diseases and health issues are also arriving and improving constantly.

"Meanwhile, other technology and treatments are also being developed to enable hospitals and health centres to treat patients more quickly and effectively, and avoid  being overloaded.”

Paul Stannard, chairman and general partner at the Vector Innovation Fund (VIF), which specialises in investment towards healthcare technology and pandemic protection, also voiced support:

"COVID-19 has shown us that global healthcare must evolve into a more efficient, cost-effective system, and I’m hugely encouraged to see how healthcare tech investment soared 47% in 2020 to a new sector high of $51 billion, with healthcare tech investment deal sizes rising to record levels during 2021 so far.

"Investors are continuing to back the sector to thrive, after seeing that healthtech is on the verge of some ground-breaking innovations."