Why we need a ‘great new contract in health and healthcare’

Why we need a ‘great new contract in health and healthcare’

Over the past year, health and healthcare systems that were already known to be unsustainable because they are too costly and fundamentally inefficient also demonstrated their inability to anticipate and respond to crises with agile, effective and timely intervention.

A lack of preparedness, ineffective global governance mechanisms, inequitable access principles and missed opportunities to leverage Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies to their fullest potential have combined to create the impetus for what we are calling the "Great New Contract in Health and Healthcare“.

Climate change, new infectious diseases, and the ease with which we can engineer biology are increasing the likelihood that we will continue to face crises analogous to the current pandemic. A number of potentially impactful initiatives have emerged that collectively, when developed at a high pace and in a coordinated fashion, could represent the chance of a lifetime for multi-stakeholder collaboration to deliver on a critical aspect of this new Contract, by building a new "immune system for the world“.



A Great New Contract for Health and Healthcare would first start by supporting a federation, or network of the most promising of initiatives aimed at increasing the forecasting of new biological threats, like emerging infectious diseases or human engineered