How can policymaking be used to promote incentives to innovate in health care?
Because Philips is a health and well-being company, the cornerstone of our thinking about health care is the care cycle. The care cycle is the complete set of steps you need to take to treat a condition, from diagnosis to treatment and therapy, monitoring in hospital and then monitoring at home. Policymaking can play a huge role in helping us to innovate to drive better outcomes at lower cost across the care cycle. For example, cancer screening adds cost when viewed in isolation. But if you catch cancers early, you can dramatically lower the total cost across the care cycle. Policies that promote early diagnosis of cancers promote innovation. Likewise, if you can send people home earlier from hospital through innovation in, for instance, less invasive medical procedures, you may add to the cost of home monitoring but lower the overall cost across the care cycle by reducing the length of expensive hospital stays. Policymaking plays an essential role here, by setting boundary conditions
