World Economic Forum (27.05.2021) Innovative solutions have been developed across Africa and Asia to deal with the increasing demand for health workers and services due to COVID-19. These include the use of drones, solar-powered freezers and utilizing Pakistan's unemployed doctors. In a pandemic, these solutions can be the deciding factor between effectively managing the virus and not.

sciencemag.org (06.11.2020) Telemedicine comes in many shapes and sizes and offers many advantages over the traditional healthcare visit, but until recently, it was largely underutilized. The COVID-19 pandemic quickly changed that—only time will tell if telemedicine’s new popularity will last.  On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, radically changing the way medicine is practiced.

Immediately before the pandemic, 300 enterprise Mayo Clinic physicians and advanced practice providers had performed a minimum of one video telemedicine consult in the preceding year. By July 15, 2020, the number of Mayo Clinic providers performing video telemedicine consults had risen to >6,500, reflecting a 2,000% increase. Through this pandemic, we have witnessed unprecedented growth in telemedicine utilization. The existing telemedicine system has proven to be scalable.

Estonian Medical Certificate Every person needs to have a valid medical certificate for the duration of their driving license. When a medical certificate expires, a new medical certificate must be submitted to the Road Administration. Once issued, the certificate is automatically transmitted to the motor registry.

Digital transformation in the health sector is not a simple matter of technical change, but requires adaptive change in human attitudes and skills as well as of legal frameworks and  the organisation of work. 

The author of this report is Karolina Socha­ Dietrich, OECD Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social  Affairs (ELS), Health Division.   This report was prepared for the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union and with  the support from the German Federal Ministry of Health (2020).  

Description

This report follows the meeting, Rehabilitation 2030: A Call for Action, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO would like to express its sincere thanks to those who participated in the meeting: representatives from Member States, UN agencies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, editors of journals, academia, institutions and WHO collaborating centres.

This guidebook is designed to be used by planners, policy-makers and stakeholders in countries that are considering the introduction social health insurance (SHI) as a replacement for or to supplement to existing financing mechanisms for health care. This book is not meant to be an advocacy tool but a technical guide for those who are interested in the issues and techniques of SHI.

aseanbriefing.com (18.02.2021) The House of Representatives in the Philippines have passed House Bill No. 8461 (HB 8461) which seeks to authorize the President to suspend the premium contribution hike to the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth), in addition to House Bill No. 8512 (HB 8512), which provides the President the power to defer the scheduled hike in contributions to the Social Security System (SSS). Both PhilHealth and the SSS were mandated by existing laws to increase their premium rates in 2021.

Oxfam (Feb 2021)  The report shows that COVID-19 has the potential to increase economic inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began over a century ago. Rising inequality means it could take at least 14 times longer for the number of people living in poverty to return to pre-pandemic levels than it took for the fortunes of the top 1,000, mostly White male, billionaires to bounce back.

Government of Andorra (23.12.2020) The Minister of Health, Joan Martínez Benazet, announced on Wednesday that the Government will offer a second free antigen self-test to all residents of the country over the age of 6: “it was a measure we had already planned but we needed more stock to be able to carry it out ”. In this sense, the holder of the portfolio has indicated that during this Wednesday they will be made available to the commons in the coming days so that they can distribute them with the operations that have been organized from the corporations.