Today is World Heart Day – a chance to reflect and consider all we can do for the health of every heart.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the one of the leading causes of death in Canada with an additional 2 billion at risk globally. Yet most don’t realize approximately 80% of cardiovascular-related events, such as heart disease and stroke, are preventable.
As you can imagine, the ripple effect triggered by those affected by these conditions has caused a significant strain on our healthcare system. In Canada alone, it is estimated that CVD costs us approximately $22 billion a year.
So how do we ease the burden on our strained system while working to improve the system itself?
To combat the impact of CVD, we must focus on primary and secondary disease prevention. With CVD, we know the risk of a second incident is high. As such, early detection and diagnosis are critical in keeping people out of the hospital and reducing the need for surgery. We also know that good data collection can support earlier diagnosis and treatment management and the ability to scale with consistency. And that better data can harmonize our healthcare system and increase the efficiency of patient care. In short, we must leverage data and data collection to shift from a reactive to a proactive position.
I believe the only way to make this happen for the betterment of all Canadians is through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
It’s no secret that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the issues regarding the strain that chronic disease imposes on our system have only compounded. Experts are calling this convergence of mini-epidemics a “syndemic” – disease clusters that complicate treatment and prognosis. To better address these healthcare challenges, we need to reimagine our approach to healthcare, and the exciting news is we have already seen glimpses of what this brighter future of healthcare could hold.
Over the past 18 months, industry, governments, and non-profit organizations have come together in innovative ways to protect and treat Canadians. We must now apply the lessons learned from this collaborative approach across our full healthcare system and build a new and more sustainable value- and access-oriented healthcare system for the future.
This thinking is aligned with the Ontario Government’s Plan to Stay Open: Health System Stability and Recovery, which is structured in a way to help provide patients with the best care possible while ensuring the resources are in place to keep the province open – supporting a stronger, more resilient healthcare system.
The most efficient and effective way to realize this is through Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). PPPs can re-engineer current care systems into true health systems that prioritize keeping people healthy rather than caring for them only when they are unwell.
At Novartis, we are actively seeking to address care inequities, barriers to access, challenges and opportunities by investing in best in class provincial teams. These teams drive innovative partnerships and collaboration at the health care system level to address critical issues, such as cardiovascular disease. For example, from 2018 – 2021, almost $3M was invested to set up Heart Failure Optimization clinics to better improve patient care in Ontario.
Our goal in driving these PPPs is to optimize health care solutions at the local level so that all patients can proactively seek and access the care they need to help reduce the amount of avoidable cardio events. But to ensure this is done right we need to come together with the right partners.
With this in mind, last year we launched the Biome Summit, an annual event which seeks to break health care siloes by bringing together public and private organizations to drive real solutions. As the main focus of discussion, the Biome Summit brings cardiovascular disease mortality to the forefront of public discourse, to provide a catalyst for these impactful partnerships and actionable innovation with the aim of accelerating progress on this major Canadian healthcare challenge.
We are also partnering with health care system (HCS) decision-makers around the world to reduce and stop premature death from CVD by establishing PPPs that supports the shift to more prevention-oriented, efficient, and equitable CV care delivery models. In the UK, for example, Novartis has established a first-of-its-kind PPP with the NHS, with the objective to take on the UK’s goal of reducing up to 150,000 deaths from CVD in the country over the next 10 years. This partnership hinged on investments to modernize delivery of healthcare to better identify, treat, and monitor individuals with heart disease through new data optimization and sharing and distribution models intended to reach populations at scale.
We have also concluded partnerships with public healthcare systems around the world, with more planned in the future, including in Canada. These partnerships aim to work with provincial, local and community-based healthcare systems to leverage data to improve CVD prevention, both primary and secondary, efficiency of interventions, performance and digitalization of HCSs as well as clinical research investments and consider how these programs can be brought to scale quickly.
I strongly believe that we must ignite the power of people, collaboration, and knowledge sharing to drive meaningful and lasting change for Canadians as we address the most challenging health care issues. This World Heart Day, I encourage organizations across the public and private sectors to come together help reduce the burden of CVD on patients, while working to improve the healthcare system for every Canadian.
Andrea Marazzi, Novartis Canada Country President
MLR ID#240758
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.