Clinicians Shortages, Drivers

To continue the cost of care thread from yesterday, the second big capacity constraint is around clinicians.

Here is a quick recipe for how to think about this problem:

1. First we take specialists such as radiologists and dermatologists (in-patient care) vs GPs (out-patient care).

2. Second we consider the differences between metropolitan and rural areas.

3. When we put those two together we end up with a GP shortages everywhere and specialists shortages in rural areas.

4. Next we add the trend towards part-time work, especially for female physicians, which make up close to half of the workforce.

5. And finally we layer the fixed 3-5 hour administrative burden per clinician, independent of workday length.

The outcome is high clinician density per 100,000 people, but low actual patient-facing availability. In other words, it’s a bloated and inefficient model.

There is a push to change that on a systems level on one hand by bundling care into bigger, more centralised facilities, which is supposed to ease that administrative burden; and on the other by changing how healthcare is reimbursed.

Add technology to the mix and we might indeed be able to achieve more with less, which is increasingly becoming the standard in the progressively older society we successfully managed to pull off. More on that tomorrow.

Healthcare Demand Drivers

This is the third point I want to address as part of my effort to explore the capacity constraints in the German healthcare system. Part one was looking at cost of care and part two from yesterday was about the origins of the physicians shortages in Germany. 200 years ago

Cost of Care Drivers

Last week I listed what I believe are the main factors contributing to capacity constraints in the healthcare system in Germany. Some of those are being already addressed in various ways, while others remain an open field (or shall we call it a blue ocean?): * Reimbursement incentives: Until recently, hospitals

Capacity Constraints

There are three main problems with the healthcare system in Germany: 1. Bad economics: cost of care is too high. This is driven by many factors, including reimbursement incentives, high manual work, various system inefficiencies and silos, and the medical field simply developing further and finding ever more cures for

AI Drug Development Bottlenecks, The Workflow Middleware Layer

From a16z: To understand where AI fits, it helps to decompose drug discovery into its three essential stages: 1.Disease-to-mechanism: Identifying a biological mechanism — a pathway, a target, a molecular interaction — where therapeutic intervention will alter the course of disease in humans. 2.Mechanism-to-drug: Creating a

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Healthcare Demand Drivers

Cost of Care Drivers

Capacity Constraints

AI Drug Development Bottlenecks, The Workflow Middleware Layer