SEDISA – Sustainability: The financial and environmental sustainability of healthcare organisations. The opportunity of Digitalisation

On December 14, our president Javier Colás participated with an inaugural presentation in the first session of the Course on Corporate Social Responsibility and SDGs organized by the SEDISA Foundation.

In this first session, the double sustainability challenge faced by healthcare organizations was highlighted, in which, in an environment of strong growth in demand, the important challenge of maintaining financial sustainability is added to the need to contribute solid way to environmental sustainability.

Currently, in Europe, the National Health Systems constitute a fundamental element of the so-called Welfare State. The aging of the population, the development of solutions to previously unresolved clinical problems and the growth of Life Expectancy, drive a strong growth in the demand for health services and pose a significant challenge to these NHSs to maintain their financial sustainability and to turn to be able to continue incorporating all the innovation that is expected to be available, in the coming years.

At the same time, Health Systems cannot be oblivious to the serious problem of climate change that affects the entire society and especially the Health sector. The health sector has a significant climate footprint and is a huge contributor to the climate crisis (4.7% of net global emissions), which is fast becoming a global emergency. In addition, environmental sustainability is closely related to financial sustainability, and although in the short term it requires investment, not doing so would mean a greater impact on the climate crisis (increased demand due to the deterioration of the population’s health ) and therefore a higher cost in the long run.

From “ADDITUM- Value in Health”, we address this double sustainability that organizations face, implementing the paradigm of value creation in health (Value Based Health Care), an innovative line of action whose main objective is the optimization of clinical and management processes for the creation of value in the health system and in the patient. For this, we are great defenders of the implementation of new digital technologies as key tools that facilitate the collection of data to quantify and record metrics, which in a transparent way allow optimizing, communicating and comparing processes, in favor of efficiency and financial sustainability. and environmental health sector.

The need for transparency of the new metrics allows us to capture the reality of institutions in relation to the processes that impact their financial and environmental sustainability, and this leads us directly to the ESG concept, which is still the evolution of the CSR towards more objective concepts. In this sense, the European Parliament has understood that there is a real threat to the sustainability of the systems that is linked to environmental sustainability, and for this reason, it has taken the baton by including the ESG concept in the new European Directive on corporate information on of sustainability.

#financialsustainability #environmentalsustainability #ESG #ValuBasedHealthCare #ODS