The Fundaments of Intelligence in the Future Health Policy

Abstract

This concluding chapter summarises the main contents of this book. It presents, in short, the main ten fundaments of the intelligence of health policy—deployable to other fields of public policies as well—divided in four cohorts of fundaments. These cohorts are orchestrated as contextual, conceptual, service-related and leadership-related fundaments. By fundament, we refer here to theoretical cornerstones—axioms or established principles if you like—of why and how we think intelligence will be rooted in the public policies of today and especially in the future. In our approach, contextual fundaments (i.e. the complexity of the society and societal change, the evolution of institutions, horizontal accountability and the value of increased public value in terms of legitimation of public policies) shape the societal setting for planning, running and evaluating health policy; conceptual fundaments (i.e. systems thinking, loosely coupled systems, open innovations, knowledge and agency) create and regulate the structure and the functioning logic of the public policy system; service-related fundaments (i.e. the service dominant—logic and value co-creation) reframe the production logic of public goods and services and heighten the role of service users in the heart of the health policy; and leadership-related fundaments (i.e. knowledge sharing and policy integration and new forms of public sector leadership) provide the practical functioning logic for the health policy actors and interventions. This final chapter of this book outlines these fundaments, providing short commentaries for each of the fundaments (and their sub-criteria) addressed.