It´s time to establish relations
One single strategic effort could enhance healthcare more than anything else. It could improve healthcare results and make healthcare visitors more satisfied and more involved – an area with bad ratings according to the Swedish Agency for Health and Care Services Analysis (Vårdanalys) – and more compliant with the instructions provided by healthcare staff, and it would actually improve health.
Brace yourselves. Tighten your seat belts and prepare for a perhaps unexpected, but in my opinion, absolutely crucial factor for future healthcare challenges:
Communication with the patient.
Communication instead of healthcare visits, or before/during the visit and in connection with the follow-up after an operation or treatment. Communication throughout the entire period in which the patients are to manage their self-care, to take their medicines and to adapt their lifestyle, could actually work for the first time in modern society. Medicines would be dispensed and taken correctly and then properly withdrawn, which would save money, not just in healthcare, but in society in general. I suspect that public health stands and falls on communication.
One example is the Västra Götaland region, which established one year ago that missed visits cost SEK 400 million per year. With a simple text reminder, this expenditure has now been reduced to a fraction.
Communication is not just about calling, one-way information or pure knowledge transfer, but also about real interaction. Virtual support groups, timed information and digital packages to be opened the second the patient leaves the hospital.
Communication is neither simple nor cheap. It requires giant investments and partly completely new ways of thinking, but the benefits are huge.
It would be necessary to structure and to plan healthcare based on human behaviour and patient needs. A strategy would be needed for implementing new research on placebos and on supporting people´s health-related decisions, and advanced digital solutions measuring results, supporting knowledge of behaviour and psychology and so providing communication with the greatest possible effect – to establish lifesaving relations.
