The patient’s new responsibility in state-of-the-art healthcare systems

Unhealthy behavioral and lifestyle choices account for as much as 70 percent of healthcare costs. Key drivers are smoking, alcohol abuse and obesity. Of course these lifestyle choices are significantly influenced by industry lobbies that promote biased research, manipulate media reports critical of sugar, tobacco, alcohol and block guidelines to limit sugar/alcohol/tobacco consumption.

On the other hand we live in a very transparent world. Information on diseases and the impact of lifestyle choices are always at our fingertips. The final decision to consume sugar, tobacco or alcohol in unreasonable, excessive amounts is made by an individual.

It’s quite impressive to imagine that 70% of healthcare costs could be tackled if we find a way to unlock our collective willpower to decide in favor of a healthy lifestyle. But it also shows how we could help reallocate resources that are currently required to treat lifestyle diseases to treat diseases that we can’t influence — think about cancer and genetic diseases.

While we can’t force patients to live a healthy life we can expect them to do their part once they need treatment.

There will always be uneducated patients that need more help and more guidance than other patients. However, for the majority of patients the times of the almighty doctor that exclusively disposes of the patient’s fortune are over. A patient can’t just go to a doctor’s appointment or begin a hospital stay without always being fully present, having read as much information online as possible and contributing to the acceleration of the therapy whenever it’s possible.

Digital transformation doesn’t mean that the patient constantly complains about doctors and nurses treating in a different way compared to what the patient has read online. It’s about collaboratively collecting information, providing this information and thus contributing to a successful treatment.

Lifestyle is an individual choice. Nevertheless we can establish compliance (unless there is rightful doubt), online research, collaborating, trying to get out of bed as fast as possible after an (uncomplicated) procedure and helping doctors and nurses avoid obvious errors as the patients’ contributions to reduce the burden of healthcare costs and shortage in resources.