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Albert-Seubers

What’s good for me is good for you

Albert Seubers

Atos Director, Global Strategy Smart X

The caring city is competitive

The 2013 Caring Cities forum in Johannesburg examined many pressing issues — not just within Africa, but to cities and communities everywhere. This was expressed through the idea of “public Ubuntu” — sharing and social responsiveness as a key to growth. As public thinkers, we can learn powerful lessons from South Africa’s organic and innovative responses to growing public challenges. Chiefly, it shows how putting a holistic idea of “care” at the center of our cities can improve infrastructure, services and competitiveness of the city as a whole. Perhaps it’s time to look at why care is so important as we enter the age of the city.

We are in a period of unprecedented public development in which we can take part and make real change, as citizens and by creating more connected and integrated services for everyone to use. Propelled by the integration of services, better IT and communications and a need to ensure the best use of resources, we see more than ever true public interdependency where integrated care services like health, social, housing, age care and others focus on improving quality of life as an inescapable part of competitiveness.

How can we, as people and city thinkers, help accomplish this? Perhaps by examining the principles of public Ubuntu, we can create more responsive services that share wealth in the right way to create the community we all want and need.

  • Our approach to delivering care services must be simpler, more efficient and more cost-effective. Using current technology, we can align improved care with relatively simple changes to treat all aspects of care as one — focused on people within the community, instead of whether or not someone qualifies as a patient or subject of care.
  • By integrating areas that many cities often treat as distinct silos into a single service (with a unified interface) that treats each citizen as a “care system of one,” we ensure that nobody falls in the gaps, and that structured and unstructured information can be used to gain insight into people’s lives and needs in order to catch problems earlier. Removing the silos that keep health and social services separate can save the city money and time. We can, in effect, square the circle, enabling efficiency and care simultaneously — putting an end to the myth that care always must be expensive. In fact, this is the pathway to a healthy city.
  • Let’s embrace what we might call a full “digital health“ agenda. While overtly technological solutions to healthcare are often debunked in current media, we will see continuing and unavoidable movement towards full digital health solutions. These services employ digital interfaces to prioritize treatment by professionals and aid in self-diagnosis for other cases, filter out simple cases, and use care resources on higher-priority cases. They both cut costs and increase speed of service while creating better care for citizens, because doctors and care workers can concentrate on areas of real need — guided by automated dialogs between care systems and citizens.
  • Finally, it’s important to look deeper into the future needs we must address.This includes embedding new thinking for elder care and better preventive healthcare for chronic and age-related problems as part of service provision. By providing better nutritional advice and self-care programs that encourage citizens to live better and be happier, government will be able to care for them more effectively.What connects all these ideas? Most importantly, the notion that “care” and “efficiency” are the same — just as care and competitiveness are inextricably linked.Digital technologies can enable — not prevent — holistic care, by connecting services, enabling care professionals to understand and cope with the changing nature of their communities’ needs as well as how service investments and technology development is directed.By connecting efficiency and holistic care within our public environments, we will create our own Ubuntu. Doing so ensures that the future of people will be brighter, their productivity realized over a longer time frame, and they will be happier and safer as well.

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