The New Care Outlook, According to Healthcare Executives

This year, the healthcare sector has been thrust into the spotlight globally. Healthcare is the front line, but also our last line of defense in this pandemic – doing incredibly important, but also dangerous work with huge health and economic consequences.

To date, healthcare providers have been focused on the response phase of COVID-19 which, as the state of Victoria in Australia has proven, is not necessarily linear. We are starting to realize that this pandemic is not predictable, and we will need our systems, institutions and individual mindsets to be dynamic, adaptive and resilient.

To discuss the impact of the pandemic to care and the outlook in a post-pandemic world, we gathered virtually more than 30 health and aged-care executives from Australia, New Zealand and the US. The conversation was part of a Cisco round table, aligned to a broader industry series and anchored by perspectives from Silver Chain Group (Dale Fisher), the Cisco-RMIT Health Transformation Lab, Flinders University and representatives from executives at acute and community health institutions.

The conversation highlighted a number of themes that describe the challenges and opportunities in healthcare ahead and are summarized in the graphic below.

One of the strong themes emerging from the round table was the importance of digital infrastructure and capability in helping institutions maintain business continuity, improve levels of care, and ultimately be more responsive to changing conditions. In the quest for short term workarounds, organizations are realizing that things like cybersecurity and redundancy cannot be compromised.

A similar round table is planned for earlier next year to again reflect on and re-imagine the next normal that we are now living through.

Stay tuned for additional insights on that round table!