Smart (dis)investment choices in healthcare

Europe is going grey and in a bit more than a decade we’ll be the oldest continent in the world.

At the same time there is an urgent need to revolutionise healthcare systems that were largely designed and built in the 1950s. A key challenge is financing.

Friends of Europe launched a reflection process on health (dis)investment in Europe this year with the intention to provide a clear direction for the next EU mandate ahead of next year’s European elections.

Our latest report – “Smart (dis)investment choices in healthcare” – harnesses the insights and contributions of a diverse group of senior stakeholders from all over Europe to comprehensively address the complementary issues of smarter investment for better health and disinvestment from health interventions that are ineffective, inefficient and outdated.

The report includes five recommendations that are underpinned by the principles of multi-stakeholder collaboration to modernise healthcare in the 21st century, always keeping citizens and equality at the heart of each proposal:

• Empower citizens, by building on health literacy efforts to develop related content for developing skills in different contexts
• An outcome-based approach to health, to solve the investment–disinvestment conundrum and identify the health outcomes to be achieved through the system
• A health-data zone, to better understand healthcare needs, identify trends and simplify approaches to improve resource allocation and reduce waste across the EU
• Norm innovation in health, to maximise the opportunity of digitalisation and find the means to create the conditions and infrastructure to seed innovation in healthcare systems
• Redesign health, to become a model fit for purpose in the 21st century

This initiative is part of our #EuropeMatters initiative, aimed at bringing together business leaders, policymakers, civil society representatives and citizens to co-design a Europe that still matters in 2030, and to think ahead and plan for the future we want.