10 Insights for Sustainable Healthcare in Australia from Sir Robert Naylor

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Sir Robert Naylor and Avi

At a recent conference hosted by the Health Services Innovation group in Tasmania, I had the privilege of engaging with a few leading CEOs and researchers in healthcare. Whilst there were many highlights, Sir Robert Naylor, the CEO of  University College London Hospitals (UCLH) was outstanding in his insights.

UCLH has been ranked the 4th highest performing NHS Trust in the UK and a large part of that is due to its clinical and executive management approaches.

A few key points that he made:

1.  Payors in the UK i.e. government funding authorities are increasingly wanting to pay for value, rather than activity. This sentiment has been echoed in Australia as we are placing more thought on how Medicare can move toward a model of payment for outcomes, rather than activities.

2.  Providers need to focus on ‘transformation’ rather than ‘translation’. Sir Robert suggested that there is a need to form integrated systems along pathways; in order to this incremental changes is no longer good enough and patient pathways have to be viewed and changed as a whole.

3.  It is imperative to engage patients as active partners in their care. “Doctors need to change from being God to Guide”. We need to change the current archetypal image so patients have more ability to take responsibility for their care.

4.  Integration would be improve outcomes and reduce costs. The word “integration” is used often, but the word means different things to different stakeholders

5.  Sustainability is the “nirvana” that we are looking to achieve. In the UK, the healthcare system has 8% reduction in funding next year due to a “Cost improvement program”, while in Australia, stakeholders are complaining about 4% growth.

6.  Consumers and the public trust doctors, hence Sir Robert feels that we have to get the clinicians to communicate with the community. People want a good relationship with their GP, and GPs that understand patient’s concerns.

7.  He also encourages more clinical leadership in executive teams and encourages them to train in business and management skills. His Medical Directors manage the money, the people and the quality or care.

8.   Sir Robert observed that Australia is 5 years behind the UK in terms of the performance data currently published, which is not sufficiently meaningful for real change. Publishing league tables is good for improving transparency and performance; at UCLH they publish mortality rates down to doctor level. The 2013 Francis Report on failings in Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust was a largely due to a lack of transparency – this is why league tables are very useful.

9.   The top priorities at UCLH are Patient Quality which includes:

·         Patient outcomes (is it going to make me better),

·         Patient Safety (is it safe for me),

·         Patient Experience (compliments/complaints)

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These top priorities are put up on whiteboards on each ward, with top metrics updated daily e.g.. staff levels, infections rates. Each of his 9000 staff need to have these translated in a way that is meaningful to them, including janitorial staff.

10.  In terms of current thinking on innovation in the UK, a 5 year forward review by Simon Stevens suggested

  • Radical upgrade in prevention and public health
  • Break down barriers between GPs and public hospitals
  • New models of integrated care (Dalton Review)
  • Re-design emergency and urgent care

Sir Robert recommends tertiary health centers should focus only in a couple of areas of expertise where possible as it improves outcomes e.g. Cancer and Neurosciences. This is to establish critical mass, and involved UCLH giving up cardiac patients to other centres, but will dramatically improve mortality rates and build capability. He admires the Dutch system where they selected only 8 hospitals to treat complex chronic disease patients. Centralising services like stroke services has reduced mortality by 50%.

Medicare Review by Minister Ley needs to remove ‘Vicious Cycle’ of healthcare politics

Ministers Ley’s recently announced review of Medicare has largely been welcomed, however it remains to be seen whether it will dig ‘deep enough’. A multidisciplinary review of Federal Government payment mechanism is warranted as the current ‘fee-for-service’ model incentivises ‘doing as much as possible, for as many as possible’. This can lead to inappropriate testing, procedures, financial waste and even potential harm. A new strategy is required to break the cycle of rising costs, as demonstrated in the Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper, which interviewed 21 leading health experts on how to reform the health system. ‘Out of the box’ strategies included delinking healthcare spending from political intervention, such as with the Reserve Bank and interest rates.

Read the full article from The Australian

How to Overcome the ‘silo mentality’ in our Health System

Most leaders in our healthcare system agree that it is very fragmented and uncoordinated due to a high degree of complexity. Due to this fragmentation, some stakeholders unfortunately develop a ‘silo mentality’ on how to solve a problem within their part of the system.

 

For example, when the Queensland Government several years ago introduced a solution to reduce waiting times in their Emergency Departments, it caused hospitals with bed shortages to close emergency departments, causing havoc to ambulance drivers and potentially risking patient lives. They were not aware of the ‘system-wide’ consequences of introducing a solution in one part of the organisation.

 

Everyone knows we need greater integration across silos in healthcare.  To do that, we need to change the way we think and form effective partnerships to jointly share resources, knowledge and solve problems. However, not many stakeholders know how to partner well, and therefore don’t do it very effectively.

 

In my last decade, I have been involved in managing over 100 partnerships of various types – from identifying and targeting partners, negotiating issues, restructuring and advising on strategic resolutions. It takes work to be able to enable effective partnerships, but the health outcomes and financial benefits can be enormous.

 

As such, I would like to share this 10-Step ‘Partnership Development Guideline’  that was developed from extensive research in the Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper. I’ve personally gained benefit from these guidelines as evidenced by our good relationship with healthcare organisations, industry bodies and the many outstanding contributors involved in this paper.

10-Step ‘Partnership Development Guideline’

1. Identify suitable partners by researching individuals, organisations higher up the healthcare value chain and lower down the value chain. Set your own internal criteria of what you are looking for.

2. Determine the level of partnership intended to be developed. (Partnerships include joint ventures, strategic alliances, coordination, cooperation or collaboration). Every level has advantages and disadvantages and the partnership may be flexible to change levels at any time.

3. Conduct research ~ Understand the value you can bring to your partner by researching all the available value offerings that your organisation can provide. Research what the needs are for the potential partner organisation.

4. Approach potential partner – for initial exploratory discussions. Establish the appropriate contact person, contact details, location and role of the person. (A ‘high touch’ approach is recommended to build an initial relationship e.g. face-to-face meeting. Phone interaction or video conferencing is a recommended alternative if personal meeting is not possible).

5. Establish clear objectives ~ State your individual expectations and identify common objectives, shared values and outcomes. Find out if the partner’s mission, goals and target market align with your organisation. Evaluate the level of trust between all organisations involved. If your assessment is positive then proceed to next step. If not, assess if mutual trust can be developed. If this is unlikely, go back to step four and research other potential partners.

6. Determine mutual benefit ~ What is the type of benefit ~ economic, productivity, safety, effectiveness or health outcome? Discuss complementary skills, capabilities and resources that are mutually beneficial for the partnership. Evaluate if any training needs are required for both parties during the partnership. Identify what trust behaviours need to be implemented to cement the relationship.

7. Negotiate terms ~ Determine with the partner the roles and responsibilities for partnership coordination and evaluation, product or service development, financial, legal and personnel considerations. Agree on clear measures of success and responsibilities for ongoing communication, implementation, management and evaluation. Consider outcome-based or risk-share agreements, as well as transactional terms.

8. Close the deal ~ Finalise contractual terms, timelines for initiation and sign off. Involve appropriate internal stakeholders for approval and buy-in e.g. legal support, senior executive, etc. Obtain and ensure appropriate leadership support and management resources available to execute the partnership.

9. Communicate and celebrate ~ Disseminate information on the partnership to relevant internal and external stakeholders e.g. local healthcare professionals, community, media, other stakeholders and information or authority gatekeepers.

10. Initiate the partnership with a kick off meeting and/or launch. Set up regular review and evaluation.

I would also like to announce our latest collaboration with Australian Health Insurers, the Customer Retention and Experience White Paper. The Paper will be released soon. If you would like a copy, please visit www.energesse.com/whitepaper by first week of May.

Is 2015 the ‘Year of Patient Experience’ for Australian healthcare?

As the Australian healthcare system continues to evolve, policies such as GP co-payments have raised controversy amongst patient groups. Indeed, when any complex system is looking to improve itself, a critical stakeholder from which feedback should be assessed is the end-user. However, when creating new policies we approach expert academics, industry bodies, doctors, nurses, practitioners, politicians and consultants, yet how often do we broadly consult healthcare’s end-user?

Thankfully, state health departments have more recently emphasised quality metrics linked to patient experience. Many of our public hospitals are now required to demonstrate that they are collecting and improving patient experience. However the system’s evolution in Australia is lagging behind the UK, where the National Health Service faced a more urgent crisis with the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust between 2009-10. At the time, overall care was found to be concerning and in several instances negligent. An £11million investigation of care in the Trust between 2005 – 09 led by Robert Francis, QC demonstrated major gaps between senior management and front line staff and patients.

According to Francis’ report “The Trust failed to listen to patients’ concerns, the board did not review the substance of complaints and incident reports were not given the necessary attention. The Trust’s board was found to be disconnected from what was actually happening in the hospital and chose to rely on apparently favourable performance reports by outside bodies such as the Healthcare Commission, rather than effective internal assessment and feedback from staff and patients.”

Following the outcomes of the investigation and the development of more patient-centred measures, the Prime Minister David Cameron said in 2012 – “I am determined to give patients a far greater voice within the NHS as a way of highlighting the best and worst of care within our hospitals. I want the NHS to put patient satisfaction at the heart of what they do and expect action to be taken at hospitals where patients and staff say standards are not good enough.”

Whilst we have yet to experience a similar crisis in Australia, CEO’s of health services and hospitals are still scratching their heads in determining the best strategies to collect, analyse and improve patient experience. In addition, the complexity of the data provides additional fodder to management meetings where budgets and priorities have to be allocated. Whilst patient experience data seems like an additional complication, it really should be seen as an important opportunity.

Patient feedback, when analysed well and actioned appropriately, provides important insights on how to deliver better outcomes and cost savings to a hospital through better targeting of projects and solutions. As demonstrated in the UK, alleviation of patient concerns in an early stage acts as an ‘early warning system’ that can reduce systemic errors and multi-million dollar lawsuits. There are also often many positive stories that can be effectively shared in the organisation to lift morale and staff engagement.

The ‘Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper’ noted that empowering consumers and listening to their feedback is one of the drivers of innovation in the healthcare system. The more ‘end-users’ are collectively involved in shifting the system forward, the greater the impetus for change – the same is true for any complex system.

Healthcare managers should consider a 4-step approach to improving patient experience. The first is to have a systematic strategy and data-gathering process – how you collect experiences and ask the questions is critical. The second is to analyse the data effectively to translate them into actionable insights – there are now ‘big data’ technologies available that can do faster and more effectively than analysts. The third is to action and implement changes through a cross-functional prioritisation process. Visibly demonstrate the results of feedback and management actions to drive culture change, motivation and results. Finally, monitor experience with performance to ensure that solutions are continuously aligned with patient needs.

Future Solutions from Qualitative Big Data

 

On December 10th, I was given the chance to address a group of experts at the Healthcare Analytics Conference in Sydney. In my presentation, I discussed Future Solutions from Qualitative Big Data and introduced Energesse’s technology called PanSensic.

Before we change actions or activities within the healthcare system, the first point is to understand how front-line staff and consumers think about the system we are in now. Watch the video to learn more.

 

0:01       Introducing the Speaker
00:45     Agenda
2:30       What is the Healthcare ‘Ecosystem’
3:50       Defining the Consumer Health Experience
4:05       Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper
6:30       High Priority Reform by 2020
7.50       Converging Data Paradigms in Healthcare
10:00    Data & Smarter Solution Decisions
13:00    Unlocking Qualitative Data in Healthcare
16:00    Pansensic Technology
22:34    Hospital Patient Pathway Analysis
24:25    Pansensic Live Dashboards – Realtime Monitoring
26:30    Hospital Benchmarking of Consumer Perception
28:35    Emotion Analysis of Patients
30:05    Change Care Pathways at a Psycho-Emotional Level
32:50    Analysing Mental Gears – Thinking Styles of Patient
33:45    Multi-Industry Validation of Pansensic
34:14    Summary
36:00   Q & A

 

To access the slides of this presentation, click here.

For a complimentary test analysis using PanSensic, or for interest in distribution partnerships, contact avnesh@energesse.com.

 

 

A New Paradigm of Prevention and Wellness is Coming to Healthcare

It seems that almost every conversation about the ‘future of healthcare’ includes discussion around prevention and wellness strategies. Governments and industry are acutely aware that our current healthcare systems are geared towards “sick care” i.e. treating people when they are unwell, rather than “well care” i.e. keeping people as healthy and productive as they can be.

Whilst this is nobody’s fault, rather design by necessity, health leaders are realizing that the cost and resources required to treat sick populations could be better utilized if they were spent earlier in the disease spectrum, i.e. before people even became seriously unwell.

This is particularly true when dealing with patients with chronic disease, or who are occasionally referred to as “frequent flyers” of the health system.

I am personally not a huge fan of the term (because it implies frequency by choice), but I can see where it comes from. It is interesting to note that from available data, many government bodies and large healthcare organizations such as health insurers can specifically pinpoint who the “high users” of the system actually are, in particular the usage of hospital services.

Yet, the available evidence in the literature on prevention is quite disparate in the relative benefits of prevention programs. We know there is benefit, but we’re not quite sure how to implement them well in practice. Nonetheless, there are guidelines to help us such from the US Preventative Services Taskforce, Dept. of Health, Victoria, Australia  as well as advice of a diverse set of thought leaders in the Future Solutions White Paper.

Whilst defining the best way to tackle prevention is a complex problem, therein lies the opportunity for transformation.

I recently returned from a conference in Mexico, where I had ‘blue sky’ discussions with leaders from Google, Truven (top 2 healthcare data analytics company in the US), Seagate (global data storage company) and also Silicon Valley experts. It is clear that the use of “big data” plays a major role in identifying those at high risk of multiple co-morbidities.

However, what’s most interesting, is that in order to intervene at a level of prevention and wellness, we have to change behaviours, rather than prescribe treatments. We have to shift thoughts and emotions, rather than physical interventions.

This is a dramatic shift in thinking for current practitioners, administrators and providers in modern health system. Personally I think we could much better in changing behaviours, or more importantly, empowering people to change their own behaviours.

Yet marketing companies do this every day. They understand consumer psychology at a deep level, and are able to change mindsets about their products and services on a regular basis. Look at McDonalds, KFC and other fast food retailers.

This needs to be changed in healthcare, and it can change. New ‘big data’ and personalized health technologies such as Fitbit, Apple Health, ph360 and Pansensic  are able to tap into mental patterns and determine how to best communicate with a patient, in a way they understand.

The second big insight I gained from Mexico came in discussion with 3 doctors from the US who were huddled in a corner talking about how they had little idea about how to manage their own personal mental and emotional wellbeing, much less try to introduce it to their patients or the system as a whole.

As such, I am collecting feedback to determine the need for a specialized Personal Development program specifically for leaders in healthcare and wellness. If this is of interest, l’d love to hear your thoughts.

Til then, ‘Adios Amigos’ and choose to live your success, health and happiness.

Expert Lectures on Success Measurement in Health

It’s been a whistlestop tour for leading innovation expert Darrell Mann, who was in Australia to present several lectures on New Ways of Measuring Outcomes. Many thanks to Australian Hospitals and Healthcare Association and the NZ Trade and Enterprise for helping promote the events.

Darrell explained how deeper consumer insights allowed significant improvements to be achieved when hospitals in the UK redesigned services accordingly.  In other industries, Darrell’s methods have created billions of dollars in value to organizations such as Procter & Gamble, Siemens, NASA and Rolls Royce.

If you recall, the Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper called for the healthcare system to be more ‘consumer focussed’ and to align funding models to what’s most important for patients. Well, in order to achieve that, we firstly need to more accurate evidence on what consumers’ needs, thoughts and emotional barriers actually are, rather than make traditional assumptions about them!

Many organizations in healthcare are getting smarter by conducting consumer surveys or including consumer representatives on their expert panels or advisory boards. This is a good start, yet it can occasionally be challenging for even a team of experts to accurately predict the needs of tens of thousands of people without objective data from local users of the system.  Survey methodology can also often be biased, based on how the questions are asked and who actually responds to them (e.g. the ‘loudest’ voices are most often heard).

The most objective insights and innovative solutions therefore come from understanding the REAL VOICES and EXPERIENCES of front line staff and consumers, and translating that data into useful insights for better management decisions.

You can watch Darrell’s webinar on:

  1. How the UK’s National Health System has moved to measurement of patient’s experiences, using data from a national website
  2. Which types of surveys are better than others for gaining true consumer insights
  3. How to better use qualitative ‘big data’ to gain deep insights, some of which is ‘untapped goldmine’ in an organisation’s IT systems
  4. Case studies of how service pathways and consumer journeys were improved using these insights (and how some solutions didn’t cost very much at all!)
  5. The science behind Pansensic technology and its ability to assess consumer keywords and metaphors to uncover the hidden truth in consumer feedback
Darrell’s also given access to his slides on the second live lecture, which also covered learnings from industries outside healthcare. Feel free to share this with your colleagues.
In addition, Darrell has agreed to offer a trial run of Pansensic to analyse one sample qualitative dataset/survey for any organization in the Energesse community. Contact me on avnesh@energesse.com and we can set this up for you.
Finally, on a slightly lateral note, I occasionally get asked by high performing leaders such as doctors, CEO’s, senior executives on how to sustain high work rate and energy, while avoiding mental fatigue and burnout. As such, when I was invited to speak at the High Performance Health Summit, which is targeting 1 million online attendees over the next 3 weeks, I agreed to share my tools, knowledge and experience.
This talk is more for YOUR PERSONAL BENEFIT; it covers perspectives on work-life balance, achieving goals and maintaining long term high performance. It’s also free, and I’m confident the session can help you become a better leader. There is also a diversity of experts from other disciplines such as psychologists, executive coaches, health practitioners involved – pick whichever topic interests you. Register here
Our wellbeing is our own responsibility, so empower yourself with cutting-edge knowledge so you can walk the talk and be more authentic in how you serve others.

How do we BEGIN Developing New Services in Healthcare?

care patient
Times are evolving, and the recent debate and general lack of support around General Practitioner co-payments (see Australian Financial Review article)  indicate that policies derived by pure economic assessments can sometimes be unpopular in the real political world of healthcare. I have to admit, at first, the idea of a price signal may legitimately reduce consumption of GP services by “over-users”.

But after some thought and discussions with my network of doctors, Medicare Locals providers and healthcare experts, it was clear that this ‘GP tax’ as some are calling it, could actually harm those that need GP services most, such as the financially disadvantaged. It is also questionable whether “public overusage” really is one of the major root causes of rising costs in the system. Which is why I asked Darrell Mann, a world leading problem solver with the National Health Service in the UK to give us some ideas on better solutions to these system issues in 2 upcoming seminars.

It brought me to a discussion I have been having with many readers of the Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare White Paper. Most healthcare leaders and managers who read the Paper felt that its contents really resonated with them. But many had the question afterward “This is all great Avi, I agree with most of what is in the Paper, but what do we actually do next?”. This is not surprising, as if you go back a decade to research conducted by Rix et al, many reform issues are still topical and they’re root causes remain the same.

Basically, today’s leaders wanted to know how to implement the findings from the White Paper in future delivery of health services. This was particularly pertinent with organisations launching new healthcare services or even Medicare locals looking at restructuring their offerings into Primary Health Networks.

And so the common question is “where do we start with making a change”. My answer is always, it depends on your organisation BUT, like with any system change, always consider the VOICE of the end-user (consumer, patients, staff, etc) and make that the no. 1 thing you do. Get that intelligence around what their REAL NEEDS are (now and into the future), and use those insights for your services redesign and development of new offerings.

Now this might seem as self-explanatory as a class on “Restructuring 101”. However, from my experience, that this first step is often poorly executed, leading to many ongoing system issues and here’s why:

  1. Lack of time, money, resources, and/or expertise result in hurried decisions – we often miss talking to the end-users of our services and ironically, it actually costs the system more afterward.

  2. Instead of doing the neccessary end-user research, we instead use the opinion of experts, and occassionally consumer representatives. Whilst this is valid, there can sometimes be a gap between what management experts think and what it is really occurring at the front line. Despite their best efforts, it is also unrealistic to expect that a handful of consumer representatives can adequately voice the multiple perspectives of thousands or even millions of people.

  3. When populations need are assessed, they are often extrapolated from secondary data sources and public health studies. Whilst this gives a “big picture view on needs”, they rarely provide the necessary accuracy that comes from speaking to actual local consumers of the service.
  4. In cases where consumer surveys are conducted, it can often include the more vocal “public champions” or those who show up based on the financial incentives provided. This ‘gifting bias’ can cause misrepresentation of the true needs of consumers.
So…. is there are better way? Well, thankfully yes, and that is what Darrell Mann will be speaking about. Darrell will be talking about his strategies working with underperforming hospitals and local health systems in the UK. He will explain how the initial analysis of the problem (ie. Problem Definition stage) is the key to developing the right solution for a healthcare product of service.

 

He will also explain how the use of new technologies (Pansensic) and “BIG DATA” is changing how we obtain more accurate end-user insights in developing new systems, and will provide examples from healthcare and other industries.

 

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from Darrell in his short trip to Australia. Here are the details of his two seminars, which are FREE for the Energesse community of healthcare leaders.

 

Live Event 1 – Online Webinar

Topic:   “Measuring Success in Healthcare” followed by Q & A
Date:     Thursday, 23rd October 2014
Time:     7pm – 8pm
Register here for the webinar

This live online presentation will focus on how outcomes and major issues in the National Health Services (NHS UK) are measured using patient and staff experiences. It will also describe how latest technologies are being utilized to measure success in these areas. There will be time for Q & A with the audience on the webinar.

Live Event 2 – Seminar in Sydney

Topic:   “New Methodology in Consumer and Patient Understanding” followed by Networking
Date:     Monday, 27th October 2014
Time:     9am Registration for 9.30am start. Concludes 11am
Venue:   Sydney CBD, to be confirmed
RSVP

This event is catered for individuals involved in market research, consumer analytics, employee experiences and patient understanding. Darrell will cover the latest methodologies used in measuring the ‘intangibles’ which includes developing solutions from opinions and experiences. His cutting-edge technology platform, PanSensic, will be covered in more detail. This technology is now being used across multiple industries worldwide. Spaces are free of charge but limited.

These are special events tailored for your needs so you have plenty of time to ask questions.

If you have any questions, please contact Olivia at olivia@energesse.com or 02 8091 0918.

Dr Avi at the 13th Annual Health Insurance Summit

My name is Avi Ratnanesan. I run a company called Energesse. Energesse is really a healthcare consultancy firm, we really help companies solve strategic and operational problems, usually using a bit of out of box thinking, so more innovative thinking in the way we solve problems.

We’ve got team in the U.S. and the UK as well. One of the things we do is we try and bring practice across the different markets to solve some of the challenges for healthcare organizations. My background personally, I used to be a clinical doctor.  I used to work in the UK and in Australia in clinical medicine, I got into the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. I was working on a lot of the things that John Mattick was talking about, or pharmacogenomics strategy, how to develop drugs to target certain genes. Before I move more into the business side and the business strategy.

Pfizer is a billion dollar company and we are really looking, also to look at where the future of the industry look like and do we penetrate those markets before we go into the consulting side. The aim most today really is to give you one or two tips of pointers that you can use in your organization pretty much tomorrow, in terms of how to solve the challenges that you’re currently facing.

Being a strategist, we’ll start by looking at the big picture of the Australian healthcare Eco-System as I call it. Starting big picture will then we’ll then drill that down into what are some of the major challenges that occur in this healthcare Eco-System.

We’ll drill it down a bit more into what are the challenges for the health industry. A lot of them have already been mentioned, but what I like to do here is just make sure you understand the logic as to why these challenges are currently occurring and why it’s coming from the health system that we currently face.

We’ll then look into what the future trends are in the industry and what is Solution Opportunities. Then finally I’ll talk about a white paper that we’re working on, we’ve interviewed 20 of Australia’s leading healthcare experts and the solutions that they see for the future of healthcare.

What is the healthcare Eco-System?

One of the big challenges that we have in healthcare in Australia and in a lot of modern economies is that, when we think about our members or our patients or our consumers, we really look at it from the lens of our own organization. We tend to forget all the other different elements of healthcare that are currently influencing that member.

If we look at the healthcare Eco-System here, you’ve got federal government, and federal government, and this Eco-System spends about 140 billion dollars a year in this country. Federal government spends about 45% of that through Medicare and PBS, the pharmaceutical benefit scheme.

When you think about that, that’s already a silos structure. We’re already incentivising you, funding you and paying you based on what exist within a Medicare structure and what exist within a pharmaceutical PBS structure and never the two shall meet. Then we’ve got state governments and public hospitals and with state government, this is the fastest growing area of the budget.

When we talk about the growth rates and healthcare spending, this is the fast growing area, this is the problem area. You’ve got not for profits, health insurance, work cover we tend to forget also covers a lot of healthcare or sick care as we call it.

Consumers also spend their own money on exercise personal training and all these things which have a great degree of influence on behavior change, which is really the holy grail of healthcare, behavior change.

Nutrition, a huge part of that. Aged care, research and academia, we heard from Professor John Mattick today. He plays a very big role in advancing healthcare. We’ve got the doctors, over 70,000 doctors in this country. Pharmacists over 6000 pharmacists in this country. Allied health, 120,000 allied health workers in Australia. Traditional medicine. We forget, it’s a 4 billion dollar industry in this country, traditional medicine or alternative health. Then you’ve got your over-the-counter pills, your medical devices and diagnostics, I know we’ve got Medtronic here, a couple of other companies. You’ve got the pharmaceutical industry and then you’ve got the private sector.

In the center of all these is your patient, your consumer, your member. These are all the influencers that currently affect that patient or member. One other things we forget to realize is that this Eco-System is actually interdependent.

Every change you make, whether it’s in the health insurance industry, in the pharmaceutical, whether you change the type of treatment that you’re giving, that has a flow and effect to other sectors of the industry. Why is this important?

When you implement projects in your area, one of the things that we forget to look at is how that affects all the other players in the area. For example, if health insurance were to partner up with primary care networks, that will then influence consumption of the consumer or healthcare, that will then influence the amount of usage particularly of its private care, the usage in private care.

Also they will drive up usage of pharmaceuticals and other treatment options. Every reaction, every single action taken by one part of the Eco-System affects another and that’s something you got to think about when looking at stakeholder management. I’ll talk about the impacts of these in a second on cost. Sorry, and the other point is that they drives up increase usage of allied health as well.

In looking at that, we then start to talk about it, we’ve talked a lot about these the last couple of days. The major challenge is all about the cost being unsustainable.

Well, have we really asked ourselves “What is sustainable?” Does anyone have a clear goal here as to what is the number that we actually want to achieve in terms of healthcare? We are leaders of healthcare. This is a big problem.

We know we spent a 140 billion, it’s about 9.1% of GDP, but the outcome goes are unclear. It’s not very aspiring if we’re talking about a healthcare system that’s really, our goal is really save money. That’s not what people resonate with.

If we look at this and we’ve talked about this already, in terms of what we’re paying for healthcare when we compare it to other modern economies, we sit somewhere in the middle. This is a graph of all the countries in OECD or developed economies. We sit somewhere in the middle. We’re not, actually compared to other countries spending a hell of a lot. We’re spending about, we’re paying about the right price for our healthcare system.

When you look at healthcare outcomes, I only think of two things when I look at healthcare outcomes, there’s two big things. Are we living longer? Are we living better. It’s life expectancy and quality of life, quite simply.

If you look at life expectancy, we’re one of the highest countries in the world. Men live about 80 years here and women 84 years on average. A lot of this is driven by the healthcare system. In that sense you’d say, “Okay, we really have a crisis.” We talked about this the other day, we actually a very good healthcare system. What’s the problem? What’s everyone winging about?

The reason is that when you project out the cost of healthcare as a percentage of GDP, and now we spend about 4% of our healthcare cost comes out of GDP. When we project that out, in this treasury projects into 2050, that’s looking up to 7% Why people say this is unsustainable is because of the rate of growth is going to take a lot away from the nation’s economy. We got to stop the rate of growth.

Currently, we’re okay. As it goes up over the next few years, that rate of growth is the concern. Currently, we’re okay. As it goes up over the next few year, that rate of growth is the concern. Now what’s driving that rate of growth? A lot of people keep talking about the aging population, the aging population, the aging population is driving up consumption. That’s not actually true right now.

What’s actually driving up consumption of healthcare services, is the fact that, if you have a disease right now, you have multiple treatment options, you have multiple procedures, you have many different doctors and specialist that you can visit. Right now, consumption is higher because diseases have been sub-segmented to even niche diseases. You might have a biomarker that you have to get tested for.

For the things that you already have, consumption is very high. If you think about it for a second, over the next 10 years, 20 years, that’s just going to become more and more, even without an ageing population.

If our population did not age, we will increase consumption anyway. This graph here just shows you the effects of that growth rate and how much population aging actually affects and how much is actually driven by increased consumption of services, drugs, therapy, procedures, et cetera and that’s just going to become more and more.

I just wanted to make that distinction so you just don’t get confused when you implement your projects around the reason why you’re doing this projects in terms of cost savings. What are the challenges? Now, ageing population is challenge over the long term. Why is that a challenge?

I did mentioned earlier, hospitalizations is the highest rate of growth. The problem with ageing population is that there is a increase number of hospitalizations, it’s already high now, it will get much higher. When we look at chronic disease, stroke, cancers, COPD, mental health, depression, the hospitalization is really the main driver of cost.

What else is the problem with the healthcare system?

The big principle in this country is that we want an equitable healthcare system, which means we want a fair go for everyone. Right now is it equitable? In urban areas we get very good healthcare, this is excellent healthcare, compared to the U.S., compared to the UK, we get great healthcare here. The problem is, populations like the indigenous populations get very poor healthcare relative to what we’re getting. There is that fragmentation issue where it’s really uncoordinated in this country compared to other countries. You go to one doctor and you go to another doctor, it might even be in the same practice and sometimes those records are difficult to access.

If you changed doctors, getting your medical records from one doctor to another in a different state is virtually impossible, it’s very difficult. Then when you start talking about discharge summaries, so if you went into a hospital, the discharge summaries here don’t necessarily always go back to your doctor.

Doctor are sitting there asking patients what happened to you in the hospital, expecting the patient to know exactly what procedures they went through. This is a huge problem in terms of coordination.

That then results in inefficient resource allocation, because we are all working in silos, we got private hospitals, we got public hospitals, we got general practice, we’re having to duplicate lots of test, we’re having to duplicate medical reports. It’s a very inefficient resource allocation.

There’s very few partnerships, true partnerships that really occur across networks. We have this culture that is, I have to say, slightly territorial as I would say, because we all got this patch protection going on.

I will give a bit of warning here that some of the things I will say are a little bit provocative, but they’re really some of the things that, I speak to a lot of CEO’s in healthcare and these are the things that they are thinking. The system is also driven by short term activity. We’re really driven by activity measures.

If you think about what goes on in the media when they complain about the healthcare system. What do they complain about? Almost often it’s waiting times in emergency, it could be waiting times for elective procedures. We’re really talking about activity, what are we driving towards? We’re really driving to towards making sure that churn is much faster than it used to be. Is that really the best thing that we should be asking for from our healthcare system?

I’ll tell you a story. A friend of mine works in emergency medicine in an emergency medicine department and in that area they’re driving towards four hour waiting times maximum in emergency. We talk about four hour waiting times. I use to work in emergency medicine, a lot of patients can’t be treated in four hours in terms of the emergency and so what do they do?

They create another ward that becomes an interim ward where people just come into emergency, you don’t really treat them and you just pass them onto another ward where it’s not recorded as emergency and then shipped them off to a different hospital. That’s what they do to beat the system.

The reality is, when you try and drive this sort of activity measures, you really don’t get the best health outcomes for the patient and really we need to look at that very seriously. Another part about the health system when we look about this cause and Dr. Ann Carruthers has mentioned it as well. Your health outcomes often influence outside of the healthcare system.

When we talk about smoking and smoking bans, those were the things that really drove smoking rates down significantly. A lot of our healthcare is driven by the Department of Agriculture in terms of nutrition, the Department of Transport in terms of the stress levels that we experience.

All of these other departments, the departments that really affect a lot of public health issues but not in the healthcare system. That’s something to be aware when we implement projects in healthcare. When we do things in healthcare and particularly with health insurance you always trying to create products for consumers.

The challenge is that you’re trying to create products for consumers today. The reality is that consumers’ expectations are changing. By the time you get your new product out there, they would have changed their mind. If you look at Apple and the way they create products, they create products for what consumers want in five years’ time.

We tend to create products based on the market research we’ve just obtained. That’s the challenge. Consumers want better relationship with the doctors, they want more options in their healthcare, they want to use vitamins and things like that even when they don’t work. They want to see Dr. Google. Most of the time, the patients already gone through Dr. Google and Dr. Google is the world’s most famous medical practitioner. Let’s admit that. We’ve got to know how to work with Dr. Google and how to get credible information up there online. They want the latest pharmaceutical treatment. As we know, we talked about this and John Mattick talked about this as well. Pharmaceutical treatments for niche diseases are credibly expensive, up to tens of thousands of dollars per dose. The reason for that is because they have to, the cost of developing a drug is over a billion dollars, but you got to make back that cost in a various niche population of people.

These patients want that because they can find out about these drugs online. They want to use their wearable technology and this has becoming a consumer driven revolution, rather than a health system driven revolution. Consumers are the one that are using this, not our healthcare system, and then they want to do things like exercise and wellness programs. What does that mean for health insurance, and I’ll skim through this very quickly because we’ve heard about this a lot.

There’s a rising cost of claims because of the increase utilization but, we’ve got our funding models are still stuck on that traditional funding models which is let’s increase the number of members. It’s a volume game. We got to find new ways of obtaining more funding into the healthcare system.

We want to manage those health pathways, those healthcare pathways don’t, we want to influence primary care, we’ve talked about it. Every single health insurance company here is going to go away and find out how to penetrate primary care. We still got those regulatory restrictions.

We still want to look at how we can influence the entire health pathway for the best outcomes. There is that information asymmetry as we talked about. What does that actually mean? Some doctors think that some procedures are better than other procedures. How does that translate to the health insurance industry?

Some of you are having to pay lots of money for lots of procedures in certain geographies, where it’s very little in other geographies. Why is that? It’s because the surgeons, the doctors et cetera are getting a certain kind of information in that area, saying that this is the best procedure and others are going in another area are saying that is the best procedure.

One thing I learned about this whole Eco-System working across many different industries, is that everyone really believes they’re doing the right thing for the patient. I know that’s hard to buy, when you talk to the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, nurses, health insurance, everyone really believes they’re doing the right thing for the patient.

When you get into that issue of trying to argue with other sectors of healthcare and you’re wondering why they don’t agree with you. Let me tell you this, they’re really believe they are doing the right thing. If you want to win that argument, you got to show how you’re trying to do the right thing as well.

The other thing is, if health insurance want to influence clinical protocols, there is that moral barrier. The AMA president talked about this the last couple of days, we shouldn’t interfere with the doctor patient relationship. The reality is health system is becoming more, we’re becoming more resource conscious in the healthcare system.

I’ve trained in the UK, I worked in the UK. The mentality of doctors over there certainly is around, if I give this patient some treatment, how many patients am I actually taking care away from? There is that mentality of I’m trading off the individual versus society. Whereas here, that mentality isn’t quite there.

The other challenge that we have in the health insurance industry is the consumer disempowerment. What do I mean by that? In other industries and in another products, consumers get to choose they type of care that they want.

The problem with the healthcare industry is, if you go to a GP you can’t actually choose a GP all of the time. You might choose your practice but you might not get the GP that you want and particularly when you’re choosing a specialist, you really have no idea what you’re buying. The other point about this is you’re not actually buying because you’re not paying for the services.

In a sense, you’re almost bit of a victim in terms of the services that are provided to you and therefore that means you can’t actually influence it and it also means you don’t really care about your health that much because you’re pretty disempowered.

This is one of the challenges in this system. If you want to change my behavior, I’m a very complex human being and so are you. There’s multiple factors involve if you want to change my behavior to become healthy.

I talked a bit about this, is that protectionism and let’s face it, there is a lack of trust between different silos in healthcare and that is the fundamental issue behind why negotiations, cooperation and collaborations are very difficult to implement in the system.

It was Einstein that said, “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” It was our level of thinking that brought us here now, in order to change and develop solutions, we really have to change the way we think.

What are some of the future trends and some of the solution opportunities for the health insurance industry?

This is quite a big picture sort of representation of what the solutions are but if you want to talk specifics, I’m happy to chat about it further and some of the speakers in the last two days already talked about specific solutions.

But here’s how I see them. One of the ways is, the government had already said, “We’re going to cap the amount of money that’s going to come into the system, we’re not going to allow it to grow.” If we need to increase healthcare and we need more funding, we need to find new innovative models to funding.

We know that consumers pay about 20% of out of pocket cost, so in this country, consumers pay quite a lot from their pockets for healthcare. There’s other ways to bring money in going to the market, maybe banks are going to be privatized, other companies could still opt to do that and you could also spin off companies to bring more money in through shareholders. Another way to look at it is through wealth management.

Currently, we all pay super annuation and we all spend a lot of money on super annuation and we’re only allowed to take it out when we’re 60, 65. This is a big area where we invest a lot of funds very early on in our life. Some people even use these funds to buy property, boats, all sorts of things with self managed superfunds.

Why can’t we use the funds from here for our own health? You can certainly see there’s lots of synergies between private health insurance and superannuation and I certainly see that as an area that’s going to be explored further over the next five years. The other issue that we have as I mentioned is around the short term activity measures.

We’re now incentivizing hospitals, GP’s on seeing high volume. It’s not so much about the quality of care, it’s get them through quickly when it comes to financial incentive. Obviously doctors want to care for patients as best as possible, but they’re often given these targets to achieve. In the UK it’s quite different. They really look at long term health outcomes. I’ll recite two stories.

One I spoke to a CEO of a hospital network in this country. He said to me “Avi, my job is to try to get through as many patients as possible in this hospital. I really have no incentive to try and improve the long term health outcomes of the community, because it’s all about churn. In fact the most sick people the come through my hospital, the more we get paid. That’s just reality of the system.” The other converse is that I spoke to a CEO of a hospital network overseas and I won’t mention the country but over there he said “I was given a fund, a capped fund where I was in charge of an entire region for 15 years. I had to spend that money across 15 years, but I was given the hospitals, primary care, the occupational therapists, the physios.” Every single area of the healthcare system was under his control. Guess what he did? “I spent every dollar possible on prevention. My focus was entirely on prevention because I had to prevent people coming into those hospitals, because that’s where the big cost is.”

Based on the current incentive structure, it’s hard to imagine that although prevention sounds sexy, it sounds trendy, it’s the thing that we all want to do. It’s hard to imagine that we really can make that change without going into a more population health management approach where we really focus on the outcomes and long term outcomes.

It’s incredibly hard to imagine that happening when we’re changing hospital budgets every 12 months as well. You really need that certainty of funding in order to put strategic plans in place in three years, five years at least. The other thing around that certainty of funding is tying it with the incentives and tying it with integrated care, integrating it with other sectors of the community.

The pharmaceutical industry is probably the most advance in our health system around cost effectiveness. The reason is this, every drug that gets listed in this country, has to go through rigorous cost-effectiveness analysis. What does that mean? It’s tested for safety, how effective it is, but also the cost of that drug versus existing therapies.

Before you introduce a new treatment, a new drug in this country, you’ve got to compare the cost versus other drugs that already exist on the market. This does not exist for surgeries, this does not exist for medical devices, this does not exist for most of the rest of the healthcare system.

As we become a more cost constraint system, we’re going to start to see a lot of this happening. Looking at cost-effectiveness of treatments. Not just safety and efficacy in quality but how costly are these treatments. We’re going start to look at risk share agreements.

I have to congratulate Cooper for doing the deal with House Corp. and looking at Never Events but we all know that outcome is really what we’re looking for. Risk share agreements means I won’t pay you unless you achieve those outcomes.

As an industry this is a huge opportunity for the health insurance industry to drive some of those negotiations. However, if you do drive those negotiations, what I would urge is not to ask them for cost savings but rather to work with those organizations and say, “What’s your big goal? How are you trying to improve your strategic objectives? Where do you want to go in five years and how can we partner with you in five years to achieve that? For the benefit of the patients. All too often, the argument comes from a cost perspective, where you really need to start the higher level and how do we partner as a joint strategic objective?

Which leads me to the next point which is leveraging partnerships. There’s this big trend now as we heard in the last couple of days that health insurance wants to enter primary care.

This is an area, and these group of companies know primary care very well, they’ve been working in that space for a long time, those are the pharmaceutical industry that I use to work. When I look at a lot of disease management programs that health insurance industry is trying to introduce.

These programs are being run by companies like these and spending literally billions of dollars. There’s huge opportunity to not duplicate but partner up on that. Same with medical devices as well as partnerships with pharmacies.

Pharmacies are incredibly underutilized in terms of their, the ability to connect with patients. In a lot of cases pharmacies have a lot more time to connect with patients than doctors do. There’s a lot of prevention work that pharmacies are open to doing and want to do with patients

There’s a big opportunity in terms of in the challenge that I talked about is that information asymmetry, where doctors in different parts of this country are getting different information as to what is the best treatment. A way to fix that is to facilitate that practice sharing. I’m actually encouraging those forums where the top doctors interact with each other, I really support the fact that you need to work with colleges around this but I think the health insurance industry can do a lot more in terms of working with the colleges because there really is a need to facilitate this best practice sharing, not just across specialist but GP’s as well.

This is a book that I highly encourage everyone to read. It’s called The Speed of Trust and someone mentioned Stephen Covey earlier. This book is by Stephen M.R. Covey, his son. In fact there’s four generations of Stephen Covey’s, they just have different middle names. The real big thing about this book in The Speed of Trust is that it really gets down to the core of the issue here. Why is the relationship between the different silos, private healthcare, pharmaceuticals, medical advice is combative, it’s because there is a lack of trust. This book actually tells you, it gives you 13 trust behaviors that as a corporation you can introduce in your organization. Stephen and I are actually working on writing a book together along with several other healthcare experts around how we change global healthcare systems, what sort of behaviors organizations need to implement in global healthcare to move things forward.Definitely a book I highly recommend.

We talked about the empowering consumers. I talked about consumer disempowerment, there are several areas in which consumers are disempowerment. One is “How do I choose my practitioner?” I have to applaud NIB for this white code initiative, it’s a great model. There are other crowdsourcing type initiatives to helping healthcare.

Another interesting one CrowdMed.com. How many people have heard of CrowdMed. No. Fantastic. This is truly cutting edge. Launch in the last few months. CrowdMed really looks at patients who have not a proper diagnosis for the illness.

I’ve been going years and years and years through medical system. Have still not been able to diagnose and they put their case up online. Medical detectives, many of which are from the medical profession, actually can offer advice on what that diagnosis is along with evidence for why that diagnosis is likely.

The medical detectives which are the doctors and experts in healthcare also get rated by the community as to how good the diagnosis is. The patient then takes that all those recommendations and then discusses it with their own doctor to see …

A lot of patients that have had diagnosis that haven’t been solve, are now getting solutions through CrowdMed. This is all about the trend of empowering the community and giving them power back in the health decisions. Another really interesting program which is here in Australia is in life insurance.

We talked about prevention and the reason I really like the AIA Vitality program is I feel it is one of the more advance wellness programs of prevention programs out there. Why do I say that? This is a study, the parent company that developed this program Discovery Health base in South Africa did a study with Harvard with 900,000 people enrolled in this program.

What they found, because this is real evidence. What they found was that people who engage with this wellness program actually had lower cost per patient as well as lower admission rates. That is for condition such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, endocrine and metabolic disease and musculoskeletal disease, so a lot of the chronic conditions.

This program has already running in Australia, I find it very interesting, and why I find it interesting is because, they’re incentivized , so behaviors are incentivized in a much cleverer way than I see a lot of other programs. If you eat the right food, if you purchase the right food, if you had screenings done, you get points.

The more healthy behavior you apply on a daily basis, your points accumulate. Those points can be traded off for premium discounts, but they can also be traded off for things like movie tickets and other sorts of gifts and prizes.

The reason this is really successful, it really comes down to a thing called behavioral economics. How many people know behavioral economics? Great. The reason this is very successful is it plays into immediate gratification.

We’re all driven by immediate gratification, we want things now, we want prizes now. In a program like this, if you do your exercise today, you can redeem your points for movie tickets very quickly. People need to see that quick reward. The problem with prevention is that it’s very long term.

This is a great way to solve that problem and they’ve done a great job with this program. The other thing about implementing prevention and wellness programs, I think Anne already reiterated this. It really get your strategy right when you’re doing a prevention and wellness program.

I certainly echo what Anne was saying, if you’re talking about preventing a disease from occurring, which is primary prevention, you have to spend a lot of money on screening to get a return on investment. You guys know about return on investment, the area that you really want to spend money on is your high risk patients.

This is a study done by Pepsi on over 10,000 employees, where they implemented the wellness programs for the employees. What they found was that for every dollar spent on the wellness program, for the general population, lifestyle and management, they only got 50 cents back, it’s a massive cost.

For the disease management program where they spend it on the high risk patients, they got $3.80 back in lower claims. When you’re implementing wellness programs and prevention programs, really get to know your objective for the program before you implement.

I want to talk a bit about the future of wellness programs and where it’s going to go. This is a technology from Akumen, which is one of our partner companies, and it’s around behavioral profiling. When you look at wellness programs you’ll see this tale of people start, they’re very excited at three months, a whole bunch will drop off, in six months at least half of people would drop off.

The reason is this, whenever we implement or create this behavior profile, these wellness programs, it’s a mass program, one message for everybody, one solution for everybody or a choice of solutions for everybody and we’re surprised at why things dropped off. The future of healthcare is personalization, no doubt about that.

Two elements around that, personalised medicine and personalised health. What’s the difference? Personalised medicine is what John Mattick was talking about where you understand the genetics of a particular disease and you developed treatments towards those genes. Those treatments, personalised medicine. Personalised health is when you tailor the program or tailor the treatment to you as a person, to your behavior patterns. This technology here developed by Akumen really looks at the personality profile of an individual by analyzing text.

This the personality profile of Richard Branson from one of his speeches. This technology was developed through the fast moving consumer goods industry, where billions of dollars was spent on market research and as this fast moving consumer goods like companies like Nestle et cetera got back the market research and they look at it and they developed products to match that, they say “Hang on a second. People ask for this product, but once we created it, it never got solved. People aren’t actually buying this product.”

The reason is this, what people answer in market research isn’t necessarily what they want. What people answer in market research is often what they think you want to hear. In order to fix that problem, what this company did, was it actually pulled the keywords and the metaphors that underpin that text to really define that persons personality profile.

This technology has been used for the National Health Service in the UK, it’s been used with many major corporations around the world. We’re starting to use that as well. If you look at Richard Branson’s personality type here. What’s his dominant thinking pattern? Well order is very high, scientific is very high and communitarian is probably the third. What does that mean? Order is around structure processes. If you’re going to develop a wellness program for someone like Richard Branson, you’d give him step by step guides, you’d give him tools, you’d give him processes and he’s more likely to enjoy that. The scientific side of him also wants to see the scientific evidence, the research, the numbers. A guy like him is probably going to like things like Fitbit where he can see the numbers and the little bit of that communitarian side of him wants him to be a bit more social.

Now for somebody else who is more communitarian or had a high a communitarian score for their wellness program, you’d encourage group activities, you’d talk to them about why improving the health is good for society. You talk to them about how they can engage and work with community through and health and fitness goals.

Really it comes down to, the problem that we have is a lot of programs actually mass programs, and in order to remove that waste of people dropping off from programs, we need to customize it to the individual and understand their behaviors and their mental archetypes.

A lot of questions, a lot of big trends going on. How do we find the real answers? One of the things that we did was, as a company we went out and developed a white paper called Future Solutions in Australian Healthcare, and that paper will be launching on the 14th of August at the Future of Medicare conference we’ll be speaking about that.

In this paper we’ve interviewed 20 leading health care experts in Australia, the health insurance industry is well represented so we’ve interviewed Michael Armitage, he’s the head of the industry body, George Savvides, who we all know, Dwayne was in the paper, Mark Fitzgibbon from NIB. We also got Professor Ian Frazer, he’s the Australian of the Year and head of the Translational Research Institute, Stephen Leeder, you might all know from the Medical Journal of Australia. We got the CEO of Johnson & Johnson and GE. The Pharmaceutical Society. Martin Cross from Medicines of Australia. Alison from the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, Dr. Mal Washer, some might have know him a former parliamentarian doctor. We also got Michelle Bridges from the Biggest Loser because one of the things around healthcare and wellness is that often the sick care system isn’t quite the expert on behavioral change, really some of the leaders of community that really know how to get people motivated and change behavior and we got seven other healthcare experts in that paper as well.

That paper will be released in the next couple of weeks. If you would like a complimentary copy, you can just pull out your mobile phones and just text this phone number. We just need your name and email, so we know where to send it to, or you can email directly and we’ll send you a copy of that paper.

In summary, what I’d like to say is, we looked at the big picture, we understand what major challenges are in the system, what the specific challenges are for the health insurance industry as a result, what the future trends and opportunities for solutions are and also the white paper which will hopefully provide a bit more granularity around some of this solutions as well. That’s it, that’s it for me. Thank you very much.

 

 

 

My Thoughts on How We Can Set the Healthcare System Right

I was recently interviewed by Informa for the upcoming Future of Medicare Conference in August where I will be speaking about the Future Solutions for Australian Healthcare Reform.

Dr Avi, you began your career as a medical doctor in the UK and Australia, and have now successfully founded 3 companies as CEO. Could you tell us a bit about your career journey?

In my time as a medical practitioner, I worked across the medical systems of the National Health Service in the UK as well as the public and private health care system in Australia. Now as the CEO of Energesse, I also work with healthcare institutions in the US, and as a result, my team and I have developed a broad understanding of various healthcare systems in developed economies as well as some of their major challenges and opportunities.

After my time in clinical practice, I completed an MBA with Honours from the University of Queensland and spent 5 years in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. Initially I managed Research and Development as well as marketing activities. However, in my last 2 years in industry I become more responsible for Innovation and Corporate Strategy with industry leader Pfizer Australia, with over $1 billion in annual revenue.

I then took a brief exodus from healthcare and spent several years as CEO of companies in the video and technology space, which gave me great insights into how innovation occurs in the creative industries and how quickly the speed of technology can move. I eventually sold one company to return to healthcare and initially managed a holistic wellness practice and supported a consumer-led drive for prevention in healthcare. The company then grew and evolved into a healthcare consultancy firm for larger health and wellness related organisations.

Full interview here