2017 Global Healthcare Outlook: Making Progress Against Persistent Challenges

In January, Deloitte published its 2017 Global healthcare sector outlook, which confirms that the challenges of providing and funding health care around the globe have remained fairly persistent over the past few years, and they are unlikely to change in 2017. These, all too familiar challenges, comprise: rising demand and associated costs, growing prevalence of chronic diseases and comorbidities, development of costly clinical innovations; and increasing patient expectations and continued economic turbulence. While these challenges may appear somewhat intractable, green shoots of recovery are now being seen in some areas. This week's blog highlights the key findings from the global healthcare sector report that we believe will resonate with our readers.

The persistent challenges facing health systems across the world

As we found in our own report Vital Signs: how to deliver better healthcare across Europe, health systems share many similar care and cost challenges, however, how they choose to respond is largely influenced by the history, culture, economic and political environment in which the system operates. Moreover, each region, country and community deals with issues based on a unique set of local and national circumstances. For this reason, comparing health system performance is challenging, as they often have multiple complex goals and vary in terms of how much they are prepared to pay for healthcare and what they will trade-off or prioritise.1

The global outlook report notes that many countries are moving from centralised to more localised health management systems and attempting to institute forms of universal coverage in a bid to tackle persistent variations in access and care quality. However, shortages of clinical resources and infrastructure issues are making it increasingly difficult for health systems to sustain current levels of service and affordability. Indeed, the scale of the challenges are likely to escalate globally unless solutions are identified and adopted at scale. For example:

global healthcare expenditure is expected to increase from $7 trillion in 2015 to $8.7 trillion by 2020, (with the extent of the increase varying from 2.4 per cent in Latin America, 4.3 per cent in the US and 7.5 per cent in the transition economies) the elderly population (over 65 years of age) is anticipated to increase by 8 per cent from 559 million in 2015 to 604 million in 2020 the prevalence of dementia is projected to increase in...