Early detection and diagnosis: Critical, but underprioritized

“Diagnosis is not part of the health system in many countries and therefore there is less attention given to the diagnosis of disease.”

— Dorairaj Prabhakaran,

Professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology

Public Health Foundation of India

“For a long time in the past we were focused too much on treating diseases. We are now rebalancing this a little bit. If we are to be effective quickly, we must invest in early diagnosis and treatment. A lot of lives could be saved.”

— Etienne Krug,
Director of the Department for Management of 

Noncommunicable Diseases, Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention World Health Organization

Treatment currently receives the most attention

Health professionals advise that effective NCD care requires investment across the NCD management spectrum and warn of over-segregating components. Yet, when looking across that spectrum at specific NCDs — cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes — a majority believe treatment is currently receiving disproportionate levels of attention. Among the reasons, they cite that health care facilities often lack even the most basic diagnostic tools and that doctors are currently more incentivized to treat patients suffering from advanced stages of NCDs than detect NCDs at early stages. Others cite that some NCDs are simply “invisible” until they get serious.

I think that the attention given to diagnosis is woefully inadequate across all diseases and all spectrums, but in NCDs if you miss the diagnosis it’s much more likely that you’re going to progress and have an indolent course where there may be a severe consequence.

— John Peabody, CEO

Qure Healthcare

“Healthcare infrastructure, where the money is being spent, has been largely on large scale delivery networks, hospitals, surgical rooms and equipment, radiation therapy, machines and all of that is linked to treatment. Incentives of doctors are linked to treating patients. There is not much value for a doctor to actually deal with diagnosis. You need to rely on primary care physicians for diagnosis very often. In some geographies, that primary care layer of the healthcare infrastructure is very challenged. Less attention has been given to diagnosis than treatment, but this is also largely a function of the way healthcare systems have been defined which has qualified them as ‘sick care systems’ rather than ‘health care systems’."

— Arnaud Bernaert,

Senior Director of Global Health and

Healthcare, World Economic Forum