Globalization's costs to healthcare. How can we pay the bill?
As people become ever more globally mobile and electronic communication permeates ever more remote areas of the world, healthcare reaps both benefits and burdens. Instantaneous communication and worldwide collegial collaboration are contributing solutions to complex biologic and technologic healthcare challenges. Patients are able to access healthcare expertise in distant sites through telehealth modalities, as well as through direct contact. Affordable, accessible air transportation renders world society highly and rapidly mobile. Concomitantly, both new and previously remote diseases are spreading in epidemics and pandemics. Both the financial cost and the cost in human lives lost during the time required to uncover the etiology of a new disease and develop efficacious diagnostic and therapeutic modalities to control it can be astronomical. How can society pay the bills when economies around the world are struggling for stability? A new model for reimbursement of the financial burden incurred by epidemics or pandemics is proposed. In addition, nurse executives are encouraged to invest in preparedness, rather than risk the financial and human cost of being unprepared.