In many countries, getting to see a GP is no easy feat. In a British Social Attitudes survey in 2020, around 51% of people agreed that "it was hard to get an appointment with a GP".
Perhaps the most striking conversation we had at the EIT Health conference in Stockholm this week was with Hans Danneels at Belgian startup Byteflies which sells digital monitoring solutions for Covid, coronary and epilepsy that enable patients to stay at home.
At the start of the year as people increasingly learned to live with the threat of Covid, there was a general feeling of optimism. Deals were being done. Travel resumed. It was business as usual - with some pent-up demand to boot. But with medical costs rising, a new row is brewing that could derail all this good will.
Who owns your medical data? Are you happy for researchers and policy makers to have access to your records, and content they have been sufficiently redacted so as to render you anonymous? And is that even the point – it is still your data after all, isn’t it?
Do you need a background in the business of healthcare to be a successful healthcare CEO? Orpea clearly thinks not given its latest appointment - and it is not alone in this view.
Almost everywhere we look in healthcare we find workforce challenges, whether it is lack of supply or burnout (or both, especially during Covid) and it doesn't matter whether we are talking public or for-profit.
If anyone was looking for green shoots of recovery in the healthcare services M&A, they wouldn't have had to look very far this week. Deals for European imaging and cancer treatment provider Affidea and fast-growing German and Swiss ophthalmology group Sanoptis, together with a multi-billion euro bid for Australia-based multinational hospital giant Ramsay Health Care are set to give the sector a real boost.
When faced with a life threatening situation, a boost of adrenalin surges through the body and triggers a fight or flight reflex. Recently, we’ve observed a similar situation where companies have been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
During the pandemic, we've had a lot of conversations with dental operators in the UK with NHS focussed businesses. Universally, they have been happy with their lot. "We're getting paid in full" they told us - subject to a small clawback - "and we don't have to see patients".
There is a new threat to healthcare companies across Europe which, HBI hears, has the potential to be more impactful than either Covid or Brexit as far as costs are concerned.
