Health Care
With an aging population in much of the developed world that is demanding more and better care, healthcare costs continue to rise, threatening the economic fundamentals of healthcare providers and payers. The logical response - rationing of care - presents serious dilemmas for decision makers. How does one ensure accessible, high-quality and equitable care while maintaining a sustainable healthcare delivery system and workforce?
One of the answers to this difficult question is to improve clinical processes through alignment to evidence-based best practices. Many such practices have demonstrated improved patient health outcomes and reduced risk, while also increasing system efficiency through more appropriate utilization of services and treatments. To encourage rapid and widespread adoption of best practices, healthcare system managers need to ensure that providers find best practice libraries and health outcomes data to be relevant, credible, accessible and easy to use. Various clinical research and eHealth initiatives have advanced the system towards these goals but there is much work left to do.
Another approach for addressing systemic challenges is to improve how healthcare providers are organized and coordinated to deliver care. Multi-disciplinary team-based models have been found to provide more patient-centred and comprehensive care, and to achieve a more balanced and sustainable distribution of patient workload across a range of healthcare professionals. Additionally, publicly funded healthcare systems have largely adopted a regionalized approach to governing providers and coordinating the continuum of care, as most individuals consume healthcare services close to home. Furthermore, sophisticated compensation models have emerged to encourage providers to offer better access, preventive care and quality of treatment while also better meeting the changing needs of the providers themselves.
We help healthcare executives successfully improve system performance through the development of innovative public policy and programs, the design and deployment of new service delivery models, and the targeted and disciplined use of funding to encourage continuous system improvement and sustainability. A particular strength is our deep experience in multi-party collaborative initiatives, reflected by an exceptionally strong track record in challenging projects requiring the productive partnership of payers and providers.