The state will have to concentrate its efforts on citizens and consider all available opportunities. An area in urgent need of reform is the healthcare system, where our primary concern is in ensuring all Slovenian citizens have long-term access to first-rate healthcare services.
Key areas of the Committee’s work
A sustainable, solidary and effective healthcare system
The healthcare system should be sustainable, accessible, and solidary, and structured in such a way that it encourages the coexistence of the public and the private. Reforming the system must take place gradually, but in a comprehensive, transparent, and equitable manner. We promote solutions that are centered on patients, ensuring they have access to well-coordinated and comprehensive care based on relevant and coordinated clinical data.
Management and organization of the healthcare system
The healthcare system’s management and organization should be optimized and the management of hospitals should be autonomous. We suggest legal and organizational changes that will enable the introduction of corporative governance and modern hospital leadership. We support further discussions concerning changes to the public hospital network, more precisely with the proposal for the specialization of regional hospitals and the introduction of so-called specialist hospitals. The competences of the autonomous management of hospitals must also include rules of corporate governance, clear responsibility and powers. The transformation of the healthcare system must be based on credible current clinical and financial operative data and also their short and medium-term forecasts. We believe it is of vital importance to set unified key performance indicators (KPI) and establish a system for monitoring KPIs on a national level.
Financing the healthcare system
Functioning and verified business models should be designed, as healthcare must also be considered as an important economic sector, which otherwise operates on a non-profit basis but is at the same time invited to the table as an equal in introducing changes to the Slovenian healthcare system. We strive for solutions that finance healthcare with measures that do not additionally burden the economy and thereby reduce competitiveness. With clear epidemiological bases on preventive public healthcare, we must raise public awareness about ways to protect one’s own health. We emphasize the importance of changes in the way healthcare works within the market.
Public-private partnerships in healthcare
The Committee also strives for the coexistence of private and public healthcare in the form of public-private partnerships. We strive for a transparent, flexible, and rapid system of issuing concessions to all who offer healthcare services that comply with all standards of quality for the safe and effective treatment of patients.
Healthcare is an economic sector and an opportunity for Slovenia’s development.
The term “health industry” includes several economic sectors, which act together within one economic system and ensure a series of services, methodologies, and products for treatment and innovative technologies in the broadest sense, including the fields of curative treatment, prevention, public healthcare, rehabilitation, and palliative care. Besides being more efficient, the transparency of public and private healthcare can create more jobs, which would contribute to further growth of GDP – like in Switzerland, where health-related activities contribute around 13% to national GDP.
Redevelopment of healthcare infrastructure
A redevelopment of healthcare infrastructure is strongly connected with an evaluation of the efficiency and quality of healthcare services, while at the same time supporting the independence and direct responsibility of healthcare institution directors. Measuring the quality of healthcare systems and the efficient management of healthcare institutions are complementary and tightly connected processes that are crucial in overhauling healthcare infrastructure. Greater independence as well as responsibilities for healthcare institution directors along with forming public-private partnerships like in other countries would result in increased access to healthcare services and thereby better patient treatment. At the same time the Slovenian Ministry of Health and other stakeholders would acquire information to understand trends (organizational, professional, clinical) and a basis for flexible and well-founded, timely action in the event of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Healthcare in critical situations
The expectations of all stakeholders in healthcare – patients, service providers, and payers alike – are justifiably ever greater.
Attention must not be focused only on the number of services provided but also on their efficiency and quality and the satisfaction of patients and those employed in healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important it is to transform how healthcare works.This situation has shown the good will and devotion of all medical staff, and at the same time uncovered procedural bottlenecks that must be effectively overcome so as to support everyone: doctors, staff and patients. It is important that the healthcare system open up to new organizational approaches, the so-called “harm reduction” approaches, and the introduction of innovations and digital tools, which increase the accessibility and efficiency of diagnostics and treatment.
The future of medicine is now
Introducing innovations in healthcare
When introducing innovations and innovative operational models (HTA) we recommend forming an independent group of experts to act independently, yet in agreement with Slovenia’s Ministry of Health, the Slovenian Society for Medical Informatics (SDMI), and the Agency for Medicinal Products and Medical Devices of the Republic of Slovenia, linking with the international network of HTA agencies.
Digitalization of healthcare
The COVID-19 situation has shown the significance of enabling patients to access information about their health (e.g. via mobile devices) with pertinent advice for a quicker recovery, control, and general accessibility. Digital information technologies ensure increased efficiency and quality with better integration of all sources of patient treatment and care.
They make “e-health” possible, including online information, illness management, remote monitoring, and telemedicine, all of which increase the scope of limited healthcare sources and knowledge.With the help of artificial intelligence, the diagnostics and subsequently treatment are of a higher quality and data-driven, while doctors’ work is more efficient. The faster and safer handling of patients creates better capacities due to more efficient processes, and control over costs is maintained. Telemedicine is an important complementary system, which enables access to suitable and timely information for ensuring optimal care.
Personalized medicine
Personalized medicine is the concept of the right form of care for the right patient at the right time. This concept builds on a paradigm that distances itself from an approach that assumes that one form of treatment suits everyone. Traditionally, personalized medicine refers to diagnostic methods used to recognize the characteristics of an illness. It also means the target medicines that aim directly at the changes recognized at the level of an individual’s molecular characteristics, and in this way ensure better results for the individual patient. Through the collection, advanced analysis, and linking of health data, and the development of digital tools that connect the patient and the doctor, we enable an optimal choice of treatment for the individual, the monitoring of an individual’s illness and the adaptation of treatment to achieve optimal results.
Committee members
Who are the Committee members?
See the whole list of committee members.
Join the AmCham Health and Wellbeing Committee
For all questions related to the Committee’s work, you can turn to our Committee coordinator Vida Dolenc Pogačnik, our COO and International Cooperation Leader.
Vida Dolenc Pogačnik
COO and International Cooperation Leader