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Healthcare costs, shorter waiting times, greater accessibility to healthcare, and improved quality of service were the top priorities identified in a global survey of 10,000 individuals recently conducted by GE Healthcare. The survey—designed to assess the areas of healthcare most concerning to people—covered 10 countries with very different healthcare infrastructures, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Australia, India, China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and Indonesia.
“The differences in each country’s healthcare infrastructure reflect the differences in their social, economic and political circumstances,” GE explained in a prepared statement. “However, responses across the board were unanimous in some respects, showing an internationally shared desire for change in some key areas.”
Survey participants included 1,000 adults, age 18 and older, per country. They took part in a 15-minute interview, which was administered online. In the U.S., the top concern was cost, followed by improving quality of service/quality of healthcare professionals, increasing healthcare accessibility, decreasing waiting times, and decreasing government interference.
Of note to laboratorians, 69% of respondents worldwide said they’d like to have quicker access to diagnostic results, 47% said they’d like to have wearable technology that transmits information quickly to their doctors, and 63% said they’d like their doctors to have instant access to their medical records. Also, survey respondents said the following was “very” or “fairly” important to them: 87% in favor of technology to monitor health when away from the hospital, 85% in favor of electronic health records, 79% in favor of wearable technology, and 71% in favor of the storage of data in “cloud technology.”
Read the survey results online.