Patients in the future anno 2025 for the Danish Medical Association

When you have to paint a picture of the future patient anno 2025, it’s relevant to include a number of conditions of the environments that the future patient will live under in 2025.

Since 1846, Danes have on average per year experienced a growth of 2.6 percent in the funds that they have for private consumption. Unless there are radical changes, this means that Danes will have increased their private expenditure by ca. 29 percent over the next ten years and by 2025 Danes will have more money at their disposal.

Living standards and the fact that they rise towards 2025 has the consequence that our expectations for the good material life and not least the good healthy life, will grow and be higher by 2025 than they are today.

The Danish healthcare system is primarily funded with public funding, and in the government’s proposal for expenditure in the public sphere, an annual growth of 0.6% yearly is estimated until 2020. Politically that also means there will undoubtedly be a focus on expenditure, control and prioritization.

The five new Super Hospitals are expected to be fully functioning by 2025 and many hospitals will expand have received make-overs. The physical boundaries will in many place in the healthcare system be significantly better than today. An overview of the many investments in the healthcare sector until 2025 can be found at http://www.danishhospitalconstruction.com/.

The healthcare system consists of several actors; the hospital sector, the municipal sector, the practicing doctors, pharmacies, specialist doctors and other parts of the practices. That means that there are a lot of actors in the healthcare system whose close cooperation or lack of cooperation has a huge significance for the patients. Patients are moving around in and to and from the individual actors without always knowing who’s responsible and where to ask. The healthcare system of the future will likely still be a fragmented system, which can be difficult to navigate for the patients.

As an example of this fragmentation, IDA assessed in 2012 that there were more than 1200 digital patient systems in the Danish healthcare system.

Read the whole report here (pdf)

Published here 2017