The primary goal of any European and national healthcare policy should be to maximise people's health. EU health systems currently face new challenges, including an ageing population, an increasing number of citizens affected by chronic diseases and the economic crisis which has limited the financial resources available and aggravated member states' difficulties in ensuring their health systems' sustainability. In light of this, European health systems need to be resilient.
It means they must be able to tackle significant challenges with limited resources. To face these challenges, innovation should be considered as a key instrument in achieving sustainable and efficient solutions, while respecting the fundamental values of universality, equity, solidarity and delivery of high quality, effective and safe health services.
As an MEP, I have been actively involved in several informal European Parliament interest groups, such as the one on innovation in health and social care, and the one on patient access to healthcare, to work together with patient associations and health stakeholders to ensure patients have access to the best medical treatments in terms of medical innovation, therapies and healthcare settings.
RELATED CONTENT
Medical innovation has proven its capacity to add value to the health system across countries. Wearable devices can help physicians give a more specific diagnosis, helping patients in creating a thorough medical history. Innovative medicine can therefore treat diseases better.
The main challenges for EU and national policymakers are increasing the quality of national healthcare systems, improving equal access to new technologies for those patients who need them and guaranteeing equity and solidarity, while also controlling costs. Access to innovative solutions should be made readily available and easily affordable.
As policymakers, we should answer the question: is this innovation worth public expenditure? Given my recent work for Parliament's S&D group on the environment committee, I looked closely at the recent cases of new treatments for diseases such as Hepatitis C and improving access to medicines.
For medicine to be truly innovative, it must offer additional clinical efficacy and/or effectiveness as compared to current care. It must also be valuable, meaning it fulfils an unmet need. Truly innovative medicines have the potential to lead to key improvements in health outcomes.
Valuable innovative medicine also leads to net savings, or reasonable additional cost that is worth the health gains. It can be considered value for money, and should therefore be largely implemented and made accessible to all those who need it. Member states should view access to medicine as a priority and dedicate a portion of their budgets to the health and wellbeing of their citizens.
Healthcare system reform is a national competence, and as such S&D's environment committee working group has drafted a list of recommendations to support member states in improving access to medicines.
Transparency is a key element. Governments, with the support of the EU institutions, should examine and compare the price differences for the same medicine throughout the member states when adjusted to purchasing power parity.
Transparency must be a critical element of the pricing process, especially from industry when negotiating prices to ensure fair deals for all countries. We have also recommended ensuring easy public access to data on all clinical trials carried out for new and existing medicines, in line with the revised clinical trials regulation.
As is already the case in some small member states, joint procurement of vaccines and other medicinal products should be promoted. This would strengthen their negotiating power, driving down purchasing prices, thus providing lower costs for patients. Additionally, research and development (R&D) needs to be seen as a value of national and European reforms.
Therefore, increasing public funding for research and innovation for the development of new medicines is a crucial factor. Given the complexity of facilitating innovation and innovative research, there must be strong cooperation between health authorities, industrial policy authorities, and academic and scientific authorities.
Overall, investing in health means investing in our future. Individual wellbeing and a healthier society obviously constitute a cost-effective investment. Therefore, once new medicine can be considered truly innovative, the next question must be how to ensure patient access. I will keep working to ensure that everyone has the right to good healthcare in the EU.