Canada has the potential to be a global leader in healthcare—but we need to make some improvements in order to get there, according to a report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
BCG’s report, Progress Toward Value-Based Health Care: Lessons from 12 Countries, assessed 12 developed-world countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.) and their progress on implementing “value-based healthcare”—an approach that uses data research to better control healthcare costs while also achieving better health for patients.
Value-based healthcare includes documenting variations in clinical practices and patient results, and making the resulting data available to doctors and other clinicians, in order to identify and improve best practices. Such a system also helps to steer resources toward the clinical centers and interventions—such as drugs or surgical techniques—that achieve the best results.
In BCG’s research, Canada achieved the highest score possible on three dimensions of its national healthcare infrastructure: common national standards, national legal and consent frameworks, and patient and public engagement. Only one other country—the U.K.—hit the top score, and in only one dimension.
However, Canada also posted a below-average score on its use of data collected, suggesting that we have the infrastructure in place, but are not taking advantage of it.
“Canadians should be proud that our significant investment in healthcare over the years has positioned us as one of the world’s leaders in this area,” said Marc Gilbert, a senior partner in BCG’s Toronto office and head of the firm’s Canadian healthcare practice.
“To take our system to the next level, we need clinicians and government leaders to better use and share the data that we’re already collecting, so that we can establish real national benchmarks to further improve outcomes and impact from our scarce health care dollars.”
BCG’s assessment evaluates national health systems along two dimensions. The first is the degree to which key supports of value-based healthcare are in place at the national level—for example, common national standards and IT infrastructure, national legal and consent frameworks, the ability to link health outcomes with costs, and high engagement on the part of clinicians and policymakers.
The second is the quality of a country’s existing disease registries (institutions that track selected health outcomes in a population of patients with the same diagnosis or who have undergone the same medical procedure), both in terms of the richness of the data and the sophistication of the medical community’s use of that data.
Among the countries studied, Sweden showed the most advancement in value-based healthcare, followed by Singapore, Canada and the U.K. Germany and Hungary fell at the bottom of the list.