February 7, 2019

AmCham Business Breakfast 

To discuss an ever more prominent issue of efficient health provision, AmCham Slovenia and Health and  Wellbeing Committee, in cooperation with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, organised
AmCham Business Breakfast: Slovene Health Care at a Turning Point.

In order to get in touch with the best practices from foreign markets, AmCham invited Parsek to share international business experience in healthcare digitisation. As a piece in the mosaic of actors and institutions, who are constantly doing their best at challenging the boundaries of the existing healthcare system, we have invited a perfect guest speaker who could communicate the views and contributions within digitisation of Dutch health system.

Our business partner Igor Schoonbrood completed his studies in Business Administration Computer Science at the University of Applied Science in Sittard, mastered in Security of Information Systems at the Technical University Eindhoven and was promoted to Clinical Informatics (transmural care) at the Technical University Eindhoven.

Since 2004, Igor has been working in the healthcare sector as an Enterprise Architect in the Maastricht University Medical Center and is involved in Dutch national projects such as “Clinical documentation at the point of Care” (RadB), “Data 4 Life Science” program and the Dutch IHE workgroup “Standardization Health Care Processes”.

Considering his vast knowledge and experience with working in the healthcare sector, he represents the ideal candidate who could transfer the best practices from foreign healthcare markets to the audience, so we were looking forward to his active attendance in Ljubljana!

About the event

The Health systems of today are burdened by various issues, an aging and rapidly growing population being just one of many. This is why it is more important than ever to provide healthcare in a more efficient and streamlined way, since it will allow us to address the risks that could endanger the entire social system. In a world where information technologies and smart devices accompany our every step, how come that the use of them in healthcare only recently started to become a trend, with even some large international companies, previously un-associated with healthcare, entering the industry? What changes need to be made to the public Health systems so they could provide equal access to quality healthcare? What legal and organizational changes that would enable efficient hospital management need to be implemented?
These are just some of the challenges that our guest Igor Schoonbrood addressed.

Joining Igor at the round table, is Rudy Douven (health economist and policy advisor at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, CPB) and Igor Masten (PhD, Full Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana) who also expressed their opinions and views on the complex issue at the event that took place on the 6th of February at Austria Trend Hotel in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Impressions

The discussion began with a short overview of the biggest hurdles of Slovenia’s National Health System, namely under-insurance. Rudy Douven continued with a description on how the Dutch overcame similar hurdles, starting in 2006, by managing healthcare as a regulated economic activity.

Introducing principles of free-market into health insurance creates a situation where insurance companies compete between themselves, either by price or by offering better services – access to better hospitals, thus giving patients / consumers the option of choice.  Secondly, patients also profit from the consequent competition between the hospitals as they try to offer services of the highest quality and be as streamlined as possible in order to get contracts with insurance companies. Insurance companies can also choose to stop cooperating with a hospital due to its poor performance ensuring that the hospitals keep up their high level of quality and efficiency,
Igor Schoonbrood explained.

In the end, a majority agreed that managing healthcare as an appropriately regulated economic activity is possible and that the starting point is opening a dialogue with the stakeholders.

Read more about the event at:
AmCham Slovenia’s Website