Thursday 19 November 2015

Who should own our health data?

I already mentioned that we had a workshop in San Francisco earlier this year. I summarized some of our insights in a blog post for the World Economic Forum: Who should own our health data?

Monday 16 November 2015

Annual Meeting of New Champions in Dalian

One of the exciting parts of my work at the World Economic Forum is that I get to meet interesting people all over the world. I have been running a workshop series on different aspects on how to prevent non-communicable diseases. In June, we were in San Francisco looking what value proposition IT/ tech can have in this space, in September we were in Dalian for the Forum's Annual Meeting of New Champions (also dubbed "Summer Davos"), where we looked into how physical and built environments shape health and in October we ran a final workshop in Tokyo on consumerization of health.

Dalian was particularly exciting as this was my first WEF summit and gave me an idea what to expect from Davos. And we had a fantastic group of people attending my workshop, including two ministers of health, executives from the for- and not-for-profit sector as well as leading academics. Gates Cambridge, my scholarship during my PhD at Cambridge, actually wrote a blog about it, which you can find here.


Thursday 12 November 2015

OECD Health Indicators 2015

For all the number crunchers among us, the OECD has published its "Health at a Glance 2015" report with dashboards and data on health indicators & status, pharmaceutical spending, non-medical determinants of health, health workforce, health care activities, access to care, quality of care, health expenditure and financing, the pharma sector, and ageing and long term care.

My favorite chart is public and private per capita health spending in the OECD countries:
The US are the biggest spender (adjusted by purchasing power) by a large margin but they are also outspending all other countries except the Netherlands and Norway on public health spending. Or to put differently: the amount of public money the US spends on health would be enough to cover all health costs in most other countries.

The full report can be found here:

My work at the World Economic Forum

As you might know, since May I have been taking a semi-break from my work at Bain & Company. Until the Annual Meeting in Davos in January, I am seconded to the World Economic Forum as a project manager for the Future of Healthy project.

FoH is a two year project on the prevention of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Last year it was all about a paradigm shift from curing disease/ preventing deaths to actually Maximizing Healthy Life Years and how interventions that do so are investments that pay off (the report can be found here). My project is looking at how to bring stakeholder from different sector and industries together and how to align their incentives with positive health outcomes.