Healthcare is returning home
Home is not just where the heart is but also healthcare
In the very beginning, healthcare was delivered at home. It was all about the experience of someone with a little more understanding than you being of support when you where in ill-health. Guaranteed treatments where few and far between. All that was expected was support. Support along the journey of managing a ill health. Arguably healthcare, in the beginning, was long-term care and the home was the place of delivery.Â
Since healthcare has evolved to know more answers to our health problems. To know more of what needs to be done to treat. Going to receive healthcare and a possible solution soon became the way healthcare was experienced. This is the way healthcare is experienced today across the world. To receive healthcare today, we go to see a doctor.
In 2020 though (actually for some time now), we are in a position where the conditions with the largest burden of care have no definite cures. Our success in many areas of ill-health, has left the healthcare system spending most of its resources dealing with conditions that have no treatment or cure - yet. These are conditions like hypertension, diabetes, COPD, asthma, depression, arthritis, multiple sclerosis. Successful condition management is successful treatment. Going to see the doctor alone, doesn’t cure these condition. Empowering the patient to self-care is essential. Care today is long-term care for the people who require healthcare the most. To do this properly we have to return healthcare back home. But the return of healthcare to the home cannot be as it had existed. To be effective the return of healthcare to the home has been virtually enabled and powered by personal data provided by the patient. Compared to in-person and powered by population guidelines as it has been for so long.Â
This return to long-term care primarily from the home is happening today and has been fully accelerated by the current global pandemic. But the services and operating systems to sustainably maintain this type of care for billions of people across the world are not fully formed or baked. For healthcare to effectively return home, it needs to be accessible, high quality and affordable. The current solutions for long-term care from home do not encompass all of these qualities. At Suvera we are enabling long-term care with all three.
We may reach a place in the future to come where the long-term conditions that require the majority of care from the system, begin to find their cures through the likes of immuno and genetherapy. Who knows? Healthcare may then leave the home again. But until then healthcare is returning home and there to stay. The services that create a better healthcare system will be those who design the system to effectively enable a sustainable and scalable return of healthcare back home, wherever we call home.
Background to this piece
I read A16z article that healthcare has left the building and I completely agreed. But I also thought that healthcare had not always been in the building. It never started that way. Arguably in our modern age healthcare is returning to its roots just in different way. Arguably healthcare should always be at home. That’s what sparked the subsequent hours of writing this. I could have referenced the hell of out this but I just wanted to be free with my thinking here. I think this is a significant paradigm in healthcare. I only hope our work at Suvera will be useful here.Â
DisclaimerÂ
I don’t think all of healthcare is returning home. A significant portion of it won’t. Clinical procedures will need to be done in safe places which may or may not be at home. Home for many people may not be a safe place to receive care. Especially for example the delivery of mental health care which in many areas of the world hold much stigma. This is not a one size fits all. That doesn’t exist. It’s more where I envisage the majority of healthcare for most people shift towards