The healthcare system is a rich and complex ecosystem.

In the field for many years, close to patients and healthcare professionals, our Vice President, Olivier Guerin, shares his view of current #eHealth challenges.

Published on December 13th, 2021 at 08:52 am

All players in the healthcare system agree that it's time to change things. It's time for a more preventive and predictive system. It's time for professionals to be better equipped to prevent new pandemics, time for patients to easily find a specialist whatever the context, time to be diagnosed sooner, faster.  The recent pandemic has revealed the shortcomings of a healthcare system that was once avant-garde, but is now failing to transform itself. Yet this system is made up of strong players, expert and dedicated professionals, and committed public and private organizations. At the same time, there are powerful levers that, used in the right way, can support these players in this transformation. These include, of course, digital technology and all the tools that go with it.

Professor Olivier Guérin, a member of the French President's Scientific Advisory Board and Vice-Chairman of Future4care, shares his vision of these ongoing changes and explains how digital technology can be used to initiate them.

N°1 - Focus on the patient, a player at the heart of the system.

For Olivier Guérin, in healthcare, the patient is the keystone of his or her own care. In e-health, this is all the more important as patients must not only agree with the devices - since information is always being shared - but also play an active role in their own devices, in terms of their autonomy and the way in which they view their health, and share their health data with all professionals in the sector.

It is essential that both patients and healthcare professionals are aware of the need to move forward in a spirit of co-construction and innovation. That is why all the players in the healthcare system need to show patients what can be done today, thanks to digital tools, and support them in their use.

So it is important to remember why digital technology will improve the patient experience.

This data is the key to more effective, more personalized treatment, provided that patients retain control over their own data.

That is why they must realize that this health data belongs to them. The ability to share their data and understand how their treatment is structured with the help of digital tools will give them greater comfort. What's more, healthcare professionals are there to support and advise them. And it is all the easier when digital tools are at their service to simplify this support.

That said, there is still an important issue to be addressed: making e-health inclusive.

Indeed, the state of health tends to deteriorate, particularly when advancing in age, which is a risk factor, especially for chronic diseases. And it's this more vulnerable target group that we need to focus our efforts on if we are to help.

It is essential to step up training, adoption and dissemination to these more vulnerable populations of the tools they need to manage their own health. And it's the job of healthcare professionals to democratize these devices, to explain, inform and train patients themselves in the use of these useful tools.

N°2 Healthcare professionals, also, need to take the plunge and embrace digital technology

Of course, there's no such thing as a healthcare system without professionals. In the current system, the attending physician is a keystone, since he or she is the integrator of all health data for the patient.

However, as time goes by and public health needs change, we realize that it is a succession of players in the healthcare system who are effective for the patient.

Thus, the players in the healthcare system in the broadest sense are obviously the professionals who must act, but who must act in a coordinated way.

What better way to coordinate than, in particular, with digital solutions and products that enable this very specific exercise of patient care and its coordination.

However, digital tools by doctors, and GPs in particular, are currently regarded as gadgets. How come?

Because the French healthcare system was built on a succession of therapeutic acts. That is why we pay for consultations.

But public health needs have changed, notably with the chronicization of illnesses, so we also need to change the way we, as healthcare professionals, see the service we provide to patients. This requires us to work differently, and to do so we need different tools, which is what digital innovation is all about.

We need to be able to analyze all the data we need, or at least to have the tools that enable us to draw signals from it, so as to be constantly vigilant. This will enable us to avoid the so-called decompensations of chronic diseases, which are at the root of the deterioration in our fellow citizens' state of health, when treatment is not up to scratch. In the end, it's a great opportunity, but it also changes our vision and practices.

Digital tools in the healthcare sector frighten health professionals, or generate anxiety, quite simply because they force us to work differently.

However, we have chosen our professions because we want the best for our patients. This conviction is shared by all healthcare professionals. 

It's up to us, as professionals, to take up organizational issues and say to our supervisory bodies: "Ultimately, the model you're putting us into - these stories of one-off consultations paid for one after the other, for example - doesn't suit us. It doesn't suit us, because it forces us not to do our job properly. And that, for us, is unbearable."

Basically, when a tool allows us to do better, we end up adopting it. 

N°3 Digital technology to unite private and public players

The healthcare ecosystem is quite complex, since it includes not only healthcare professionals, but also - and this is what Future4care is all about - manufacturers capable of bringing us new solutions. And let's not forget other players, too often in the shadows, such as local authorities. In particular, town halls, departments and regions. These are key players when it comes to economic development and, in particular, prevention. There is also a French specificity. Patient associations. They are essential players to include in this ecosystem, because they have the extremely detailed knowledge we need. Generating innovation without them is virtually impossible. 

Having said that, it is well known that there's a long-standing French opposition between these private and public players. 

The presence of a professor and doctor as Vice-President of Future4care is not insignificant. It's also to make the link between these two types of players, whether in healthcare or industry.  

The aim of this rapprochement is, quite simply, to be of service to patients. As soon as this objective is shared, there is no longer any boundary between the private and the public sectors, as long as the necessary safeguards are put in place, in terms of respect for the patient, respect for patient confidentiality and respect for the patient's person and autonomy. We all need to be on board.

That's how we will live up to the expectations of our fellow citizens and ourselves, as potential future patients.

However, it is clear that there is fragmentation, due to this ancestral opposition. This fragmentation in the healthcare system, which is so frightening, is internal to what we traditionally call healthcare. But it is also accompanied by two other axes. As the WHO says, health is medical, psychological and social. The health axis, as we understand it, is medical. But there is also psychology. We are experiencing this with Covid, we have experienced it with mass tragedies, like the 2015 attacks on our territory. Finally, the social axis. Health is inseparable from our social environment and our integration into society, especially for the most precarious and vulnerable among us. It's for them that we need to make the most connections, and for whom digital tools are also the most useful.

This fragmentation is therefore manifold. Let's take up the challenge together, in a coordinated way, to prove our good will. Digital tools will help us achieve this, because they are the best levers for defragmentation of the healthcare system, provided that their genesis, this co-design of innovation, is already shared by patients, by healthcare professionals, with the manufacturers who bring us the solutions. 

What role does Future4care play?

Patients are at the heart of the system. There can be no innovation without co-designing it with them, because they will be using these innovations for their own health. This co-construction is Future4care's DNA. It's only once everyone agrees and comes together that we'll be able to implement these new solutions, which are first and foremost intended for patients and all citizens who want to preserve their health throughout their lives. In order to achieve this, we intend to involve healthcare professionals alongside the patient community from the outset. All of this, with those who are capable of providing solutions at the center, i.e. the entrepreneurs. They are there to bring us their creative intelligence and their ability to find solutions to our questions, as healthcare professionals, and to the questions of our patients.