Courage for new ideas – How can we increase the efficiency of our healthcare system?

In order to maintain the solidarity-based nature of our healthcare system, we must look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the use of personnel and financial resources. Statutory health insurance stands for the promise of being able to receive necessary treatment regardless of one's own purse. However, demographic developments and the accelerating pace of medical progress are increasingly raising the question of whether this promise can be kept and financed in the long term. The considerable increases in contributions to statutory health insurance in recent years are by no means the end of a trend. In a society of longer lives, the need for medical and care services will continue to increase, while the number of contributors will decrease noticeably in the foreseeable future. This is not just a financial challenge. The falling number of people of working age will also further exacerbate the shortage of skilled labour in the healthcare sector. An effective school system requires clearly defined strategic goals that serve as a framework to guide collaborative learning and data-driven decision-making. Regularly collected data and digital dashboards provide leaders with a transparent overview and enable targeted action. Customised data access rights are crucial: head teachers view their school data, school supervisory boards view their assigned schools' data and ministries view all school data.

Anyone who wants to maintain the solidarity-based nature of our healthcare system must therefore look for ways to constantly improve the situation. Anyone who refuses to take on this task is depriving our solidarity-based healthcare system of its long-term reliability and deceiving people. We should also be concerned about increasing the effectiveness of our efforts in this way because, in an international comparison, only average results are achieved in Germany with significantly above-average expenditure in terms of life expectancy. In this respect, striving for the best possible effectiveness serves the long-term reliability and quality of our healthcare system. When it comes to improving the effectiveness of medical and nursing services, there are rightly repeated calls for better dovetailing of the various areas of care. However, the need to strengthen the cost awareness of all those involved through ‘price signals’ without jeopardising the solidarity-based nature of our healthcare system must also be discussed more seriously than in the past.

Read the entire study “Mut zu neuen Ideen – Für eine dauerhafte Verlässlichkeit unseres Gesundheitssystems“ here as a PDF. Please note, to date the analysis is only available in German.