Collaboration Holds Greatest Potential for Health Innovation

When going from one healthcare provider to another, a patient’s health information—including the symptoms, test results, diagnosis, treatment plans, medications, allergies—can often be lacking, missing, contradictory, or just confusing.

Healthcare leaders recognize that we have been poorly equipped to share patient information and are eager for changes. In fact, a recent survey of top healthcare leaders around the world indicates they’re most concerned with implementing technology that allows doctors to communicate with each other, believing that collaboration and information-sharing among health professionals have the greatest near-term potential for facilitating large-scale health sector innovation.

Recently, as part of the World Health Congress keynote presentation and a panel discussion titled “Ministerial Forum on Global Health Innovation: A Perspective on National Health Opportunities,” Cisco released findings from a global health leader survey on national health sector innovation. According to the survey, 65% of government healthcare officials in 16 countries believe that technology-enabled collaboration among medical professionals is the innovation mostly likely to lead to the transformation of healthcare systems.