Health is one of the World Economic Forum’s key focus areas as it is directly aligned with the Forum’s mission: Committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in shaping the global, regional and industry agendas. The Forum focuses on three key health-related activities: advocacy, dialogue and action through partnership.
The Forum recognises health as an important part of long-term economic development and engages its members and other stakeholders to advocate health as an investment.
Health is an issue that involves multiple stakeholders – intergovernmental organisations, NGOs, local governments, academic experts, private organizations, and others, all of which are trying to contribute to health and to ensure availability and quality of health services. The Forum is uniquely positioned to connect these stakeholders and catalyze improved efficiency through meaningful dialogue and interactions within the global health agenda.
Recognising that private sector participation is critical to addressing health issues, the Forum plays an active role in engaging the private sector and setting up public-private partnerships (PPP) to help address global health challenges.
Health is an area in which entrepreneurship can flourish. It is the mission of the Forum’s Health team to galvanise business to take action in global health. A comprehensive and holistic approach to improving health reveals several gaps – opportunities wherein ideas and industries can thrive with a focus on health.
In terms of healthcare delivery, there's growing recognition that the old models are not sustainable in developed countries. They also do not provide broad enough access in the less developed world. As chronic and non-communicable disease rates continue to climb, governments, private sector, and non-governmental organizations are wrestling with how to provide, disseminate, and pay for adequate prevention and treatment. Emerging markets could play a key role in the solution as a source of innovation arising from the availability of talent and cost structures.
The objectives of the dialogue on healthcare delivery are to better understand the role of the private sector in healthcare delivery, identify new innovative cost effective models of quality healthcare delivery and generate greater awareness of the identified scalable and replicable models across markets.
