PHILIPSBURG:— Strengthened Health Care Cooperation between ARU-CUR-SXM Minister Lee recently returned from the Health Care Conference in Aruba (HCCA) where the theme was about integrated healthcare. Integrated health care according to Harvard Education website is defined as ‘a network of organizations that provides or arranges to provide a coordinated continuum of service to a defined population and is willing to be held clinically and fiscally accountable for the outcome and health status of the population served.’ “If we want to ensure that we are delivering a high quality of care to our people we need to make sure that our system works well together, in other words, everyone has a role – financiers, SZV, family doctors, specialist, hospitals, everybody has role to play in terms of making sure we deliver the best quality care at an affordable price to our people”, stated Minister Lee.
The conference was attended by policy makers, surgeons, health professionals, consultants, and focused primarily on how do we overall improve the quality of care. In this conference, specific actionable steps included the signing of two (2) agreements. One cooperation agreement signed between the Inspectors of St. Maarten and Aruba, and the second agreement is a letter of intent that was signed between the Ministers from Aruba Curacao and St. Maarten, based on previous agreements.
“As we look at how to integrate health care in order to ensure that we deliver the best quality of care for our people, there is a lot of things in the individual countries that are repetitive and being duplicated. For example, all countries are spending money on developing detailed protocols for hospitals. These are things all hospitals have to have, and instead of all our hospitals individually spending money to develop these things, it makes sense to coordinate so that we can economize with our money and get more bang for our dollar.”
Within the letter of intent which is still to be ratified by the Council of Ministers, one of the focus areas include preventive care. Namely, how do we make sure that we are focused on non-communicable diseases in particular –cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes, cancer – as it pertains to sharing best practices, for example how we are educating our population and how we are executing preventative care protocols to make sure our population is healthy.
Another key area of interest is structured cooperation between the hospitals. “All the hospital are all interestingly working towards JCI accreditation, which gives great synergy that we all are working in the same direction. We have agreed to work on developing benchmarks so that we can better understand how are the individual hospitals performing. By calculating the information and benchmarking it against each other it gives us a good comparison to see how is the hospital actually performing.”
The agreement also mentions structured cooperation between public health insurance companies. Each of our islands has a health insurance company – SVB, SZV, AZV. Discussions focused on the possibility of bulking the purchasing of software together instead of all of us purchasing different software that doesn’t speak together. In addition, sharing best practices and worst practices among the health insurance companies.
Minister Lee expressed his vision to one day in the near future see a dashboard developed for hospitals and health insurance companies that give an overview of how they are performing so that we can compare against each other.
Additionally, it was identified that all countries have the same legislative concerns. Some areas include the BIG legislation and the development of a sin tax. On St. Maarten this discussion is currently being held with the Ministry of Finance and we are looking at the possibility of a tax on alcohol, tobacco, as well as sugar drinks, as are all of the other islands.
“One of big cost drivers in most health care systems are pharmaceutical drug costs. Aruba and Curacao have taken different strategies to address the pharmaceutical costs, while St. Maarten is presently in the process of tackling its drug costs. This provides a great opportunity for St. Maarten to learn from our neighbors in terms of what have they done and what has been effective, and hopefully St. Maarten can benefit from their experiences,” stated Minister Lee.
Additionally, addressing waste and efficiency within out health care organizations is essential. At the conference, the Ministers agreed to explore working towards on joint purchasing, pooling our purchasing power. There were discussions about can all countries refer patients to the same hospitals, so it gives more leverage for negotiating prices but more importantly negotiating a streamlined operation of services.
Aruba, in particular, is very interested in having their entire health care system audited by a professional entity. If that entity is hired discussion have been held on whether this entity could be hired to compare all three island for the benchmarking and comparison purposes.
Furthermore, the agreement mentions reaching out to PAHO for an analysis of environmental risk factors. This relays mostly to the dump on all islands and in Aruba and Curacao, the refineries. Namely, how do we as Ministries of Health lay down the parameters in terms of the emissions and from a health perspective how these entities should be managed.
The follow-up meeting has already been established to be held in the last week of July and all countries are working diligently to have some tangible progress to discuss in that meeting as well as continuing the discussion about how do we move further ahead.
Source: St. Martin News Network
Strengthened Health Care Cooperation between ARU-CUR-SXM.
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