In my opinion (and unfortunately also based on personal life experiences), there is a lot of inefficiency and duplication of costs in our healthcare system. If a family doctor “hesitates” to order an extended blood test, the patient ends up in the emergency room where the test is done, and then the patient is sent back to the family doctor, who now orders another blood test. The family doctor system needs to be revised, and this profit-oriented approach should be stopped! The same goes for disability assessment – if a person has a permanent disability (such as loss of vision, kidney failure, etc.), the eye won’t recover, nor will the kidney grow back. Maybe we should stop this unnecessary hassle and free up the time of so-called expert doctors, who often consider themselves “smarter” than the doctors who regularly deal with patients.

I also highly recommend reading Niklas Modig’s book “This is LEAN,” where he describes how it is possible to shorten the so-called “Throughput time” in healthcare, i.e., how to optimize processes in medicine as well. This didn’t receive much enthusiasm in Estonia, as every clinic, hospital, and doctor here tends to act like a king of their own domain. Perhaps it’s time to start focusing on the patient and efficiency?!