Royal Philips has announced the findings from its second annual Future Health Index – an international study of both the general population and health care professionals, evaluating care connectedness and integration.

“The reason why we do the future index is that we like to convene people, policy makers, providers, insurers and patient advocates around the table, so that the debate can be held in a more integral fashion,” Frans van Houten, CEO of Philips, told HCB News.

As Philips has become a pure health technology company, this focus is of particular interest, as it facilitates movement toward “more integrated health platforms,” he noted.

The study took data from sources such as WHO and the World Bank to create an accurate picture of health care spending and the state of affairs of the health care system.

“This year, for the first time, we are introducing the comparison between reality and the perception index,” said van Houten

Fully 91 percent of Americans put health over wealth, and 84 percent would rate their health positively. That contrasts to health care pros, who rate overall health for Americans as just 53 percent positively.

“We find there are significant gaps between what people expect and what they get,” he stressed, adding that where people expect integration to be normal, it is actually much less, which he observed is something “we can all recognize ... from our own anecdotal visits.”

Consumers, he advised, often have a perception that health care is integrated, pointing out that “at first glance that is what they expect, then the reality is that it isn’t – and people only find that the integration is not there once they are a patient in the system.”

Seventy percent of consumers would like more connected care but only 17 percent believe that it’s in place. A similar gap was found among professionals, as well.

Other findings from the survey included:

• 86 percent of health care professionals and 61 percent of the general population say integration would improve the quality of U.S. health care


• Nearly half of the general population thinks integration will push up health care costs


• 49 percent of health care professionals think integration will push up costs to patients; 54 percent say it will raise overall costs

For van Houten, the results of this year's survey are a “a confirmation of our strategy – a patient-centric integrated care approach,” and a confirmation that “connected care is what people want.”

Such technology, he suggested, would enable recovery after a health event “in their home settings” and would permit “a different relationship between patient and provider through telehealth.”

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