Healthcare systems around the world are facing a number of big issues. High costs may be the most visible, but quality and access to care are also looming large. A recent survey commissioned by GE Healthcare found that American hospitals “may not be prepared to tackle the serious capacity and patient flow challenges ahead.” Another study that polled American, British, and Chinese nurses about patient safety revealed that many of them have “witnessed errors and few call their own hospitals safe.”

Over the last couple of years, we have written about medtech’s “new normal,” an environment in which funding constraints, pricing pressures, comparative effectiveness research and other trends have put innovation under unprecedented strain. But many of these developments are merely manifestations of a larger trend: the need to make health care costs sustainable and the concomitant realignment of incentives around health outcomes. A range of patient-empowering, information-leveraging technologies (PI technologies) — which are blurring the lines between medical devices/diagnostics and health IT — have the potential to make health care delivery vastly more efficient and disrupt much of the medtech industry in the process.

La salud es un tema muy importante que no hay que descuidar. Las personas que se preocupan por su salud visitarán a sus propios médicos de cabecera, realizarán revisiones periódicas en diferentes aspectos de su salud, comprarán fármacos para sus tratamientos médicos, etc. Todo ésto conlleva un gasto, y Simplee pretende centralizar el seguimiento del coste total sanitario de cada usuario.