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
New technology and digitalization of the healthcare system
The Covid-19 pandemic contributed to growth of digitalization in health care, such as telemedicine, teleconsultations, remote monitoring, and other platforms of digital health care. It highlighted the importance of quality information and its use.
There is a lot of knowledge and competencies in the Slovenian technology-innovative environment. We suggest maintaining a pilot project of a digital hospital. With willful deliberation and gradually, with the help of process renovation and simultaneous use of the newest digital information technology, it would provide increased effectiveness and quality treatment, at the center of which is the individual/patient. Process digitalization must not mean extra work for the medical staff, but rather relief that will allow additional time for the treatment of patients and progress for medical staff. A key phase in the project initiation is the qualification of medical staff for renewed digitalization processes.
Value-based healthcare and quality indicators
Healthcare systems around the world are facing an increase in expenses. Value-based healthcare is an approach to providing health care that is concentrated on treatment outcomes, from diagnostics to health care, which are important to the patient. At the same time, it optimizes the use of resources and expenses connected with the guarantee of health care. The goal must shift from focusing on the treatment of disease to prevention and meeting the patient’s needs. This also means a shift in the accounting models, as payment for services provided is based on treatment outcomes for the individual patient and not only on the type and quantity of healthcare services provided.
Part of concentrating on the patient also concerns the quality of providers and services provided. There are already some specific quality indicators in place. The data and performance analysis of individual providers should become of key importance for decision makers and management in the healthcare systemand also for healthcare payers. Quality indicators are important especially for patients, as they can be used as a basis for them to decide whom to trust with their health. Results of analyses of quality indicators should therefore be accessible to everyone. Of course, this segment of the value-based healthcare initiation mainly shows the potential for scaling-up in the following phases of the initiation.
Modern infrastructure and equipment through public-private partnerships
The public-private partnership (PPP) model addresses the design, construction, financing, and management of a health project. Usually, this is an investment in healthcare infrastructure, such as a hospital or advanced medical equipment. A key benefit of the PPP model is the optimal sharing of project risks between public and private partners in such way that each partner takes over the part of the risks that it can manage better. Modern ways of treating patients increasingly involve interdisciplinary skills. As the development of medical treatment involves large financial investments, business and investment management skills and experience are also becoming important in the application of advanced business practices. This very wide range of different interdisciplinary skills and expertise is difficult to provide within the existing healthcare institutions, so the PPP business model is an appropriate way to combine advanced medical treatment expertise with efficient business management methods.
Sustainable health financing
Reforming the financing of the public health system is an urgent priority in the Republic of Slovenia, and it is linked to its accessibility. We cannot solve the problems of financing the health system by abolishing supplementary health insurance and replacing the shortfall in these funds with new duties or taxes. We support a change in the financing of the public health system in a way that seeks other sources of financing in addition to gross domestic product (GDP) that are based on credible macroeconomic studies and analyses.
The thoughtful introduction of new forms of non-tax health financing would preserve and enable innovation and therefore a progressive health system. Systemic solutions and the introduction of various forms of individual and collective voluntary health insurance would relieve the burden on people. In the long term, the worrying rise of self-payment, which is being established in parallel, means that market-based healthcare would only be affordable to those who can pay for it.
Corporate governance and competent human resources in healthcare
A major and key challenge for the governance and management of hospitals and all healthcare providers is regulation that does not allow the introduction of modern regulated models. The legal-formal regulation, conditioned by the status of a public institution, is rigid and inadequate for the challenges of the time and the situation of the Slovenian healthcare system. The current situation prevents full initiative, flexibility, recruitment of staff, adaptation of the individual organization, and changes conditioned by local specificities and forecasting of population health trends.
The expectations of health system stakeholders are also a challenge. In addition to the number of services provided, the focus of management must also be on efficiency and quality, linked to patient and staff satisfaction. This requires continuous transformation of the organization of work and processes in healthcare. By making all business and clinical processes patient-centered and patient-experienced, and by putting the individual at the center of the system, the system will operate sustainably, affordably, and in solidarity.
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