“Extreme Affordability” is a new design-requirement that upends the growing healthcare affordability problem by forcing close inspection of the value equation that controls for quality against cost. Costs can decrease without a corresponding slip in quality when we are relentless to improve the processes, supply chains, and synergies we use to create value. Economies of scale, when correctly applied, can bring bottom-of-pyramid customers into the healthcare market with capacity to pay. Anyone can practice such value-focused principles in the 21st century—businessmen, designers, scientists, and educators. Global goalsetting such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and aspirations to achieve Universal Healthcare as championed by the World Bank necessitates that we soon learn how to think this way. Can we afford not to? Organizations allowing themselves to be shaped by Extreme Affordability constraints enjoy advantages of fitness in a landscape of global competiveness, can successfully attract collaborators, and will find performance advantages.
In the context of rising healthcare costs around the world and collapsing affordability of care, new interdisciplinary configurations have become animated by the cost-inverted concept of “Extreme Affordability”—can we shape products and systems for massive inclusion of the world’s health-seeking population and in the process, reform our own systems?
The prospect has energized a growing cadre of inventors, policy-makers, physicians and patient advocates and has reinvigorated the academic environment as a forum where new products are taken to market and smarter interventions are designed for the resource-poor.
The University of Utah Center for Global Surgery, Global Health Education, Global Public Health, and Global Health – Health Sciences are sponsoring an important interdisciplinary conference called “Extreme Affordability” January 19-21. This conference will gather inspired minds from the University of Utah that are inventing, healing, researching, and partnering their way towards solutions that include a greater portion of the world in systems that deliver care. The Extreme Affordability Conference is a Global Health Conference themed around disruption of the barriers facing strong global health systems. “Extreme Affordability” is a conference for everyone seeking to build problem-solving solutions for healthcare delivery problems that are too big for one profession, university, industry, or geography to solve on its own.
Click here http://healthsciences.utah.edu/globalhealth/extreme-affordability/ to register for the 2017 Extreme Affordability Conference, hosted by University of Utah.