Health Systems

Helping redesign health systems to improve outcomes, quality of care, and access to care

All healthcare systems face a common set of challenges: changing demographics with an aging population, associated increases in the prevalence of long-term conditions, increasing recognition of the variation in quality of care across providers, and growing spend on health and care.

We support health and care systems, including governments, regional authorities, local councils, public and private payers and providers (hospitals, community- and mental-health providers, and primary-care providers) set strategic priorities, design effective and efficient systems, build capabilities, and implement innovative, high-quality, and cost-effective delivery models to improve access to care and deliver better health outcomes and patient experiences. We leverage our substantial, global experience in working with private and public health and care leaders and a deep understanding of all aspects of health-system transformation, catalyzed by experts in healthcare, business, and economics, to solve the most pressing problems.

We work with health and care systems to enable high-quality, cost-effective care—for example, organizational form; workforce transformation; incentives and payment mechanisms, such as outcome-based commissioning; supporting regulation; data transparency; advanced analytics; best-practice guidance, such as standardized care pathways; patient education; clinical leadership; performance management and culture; and the widespread adoption of technology and digital.

What we do

Development of the case for change

We support health and care systems with a range of propriety tools and databases to quantify rapidly how well any system or region is performing. We look at clinical quality of care, health outcomes, patient experience, access to care, social determinants of care, and cost efficiencies.

Creation of effective strategies

We work with health and care systems, regions, payers, and groups of providers to build a vision for the future of services to optimize the delivery of care to the populations they serve.

Development of innovative models of care

We work with health systems—for example, innovative primary- and community-care providers, networks of care providers, and high-throughput elective centers—to explore new models of care.

Examples of our work

Health-system-payment reform

We supported the ministry of health of a large European country design a new payment model for its entire health system. The work involved undertaking extensive international benchmarking on healthcare-payment mechanisms, payment-reform initiatives, and innovative payment models and designing a set of options for payment reform at the national level.

Transformation of health- and social-care services for a UK city

A partnership of local health- and social-care commissioners was leading a citywide strategy to improve care quality and consistency. We helped the partnership identify opportunities to reduce the average length of stay in hospitals by one to three days across the system, deliver a proportion of the revenue savings targeted by the program, and avoid approximately £100 million in capital expenditure through better use of estates. We also developed the partnership’s competencies in business intelligence and financial modelling, building skills and tools that it can reuse in future health-service planning.

Improved performance through collaboration

For one European government, we helped launch a center focused on precision medicine. Through creating an infrastructure around genome sequencing for clinical treatment and research, this center has led the movement of diagnosis, treatment, and research. The center has worked to facilitate data processing through public–private collaboration, hosting two “super laboratories” that include whole-genome sequencing and a high-performance computing facility. In total, the center’s work has facilitated whole-genome sequences for hundreds of children with rare diseases.

Transformational redesign

We helped a regional health and care system serving a population of around 750,000 carry out a comprehensive review of population needs and current service provision and redesign services across the whole patient pathway, including primary care, community care, acute-care-specialist services, public health, mental health, and social care. Working with local clinicians, we quantified current and projected health needs, built a baseline and five-year projection model of activity and spend across all care settings, mobilized around 150 clinicians across the region to develop and evaluate different clinical models, and evaluated detailed options for the future of hospital and community-based care. We went on to perform a further review of out-of-hospital care, including a detailed quantification of future workforce requirements.

Transformation of services

We supported multiple health systems in determining a clinically and financially sustainable configuration of acute services and transform out-of-hospital services. We brought together the key stakeholders to provide input and assess a range of potential service-configuration options, and helped them identify a solution that retains the workforce and solves quality challenges around unsustainable services while also retaining acute services in the local area and improving the overall financial position of the system. We also provided a baseline of activity and performance to enable the incoming chief executive to get up to speed quickly, resulting in the rapid establishment of a length-of-stay-reduction program to address one of the largest productivity issues.