Aspen Healthcare Forum 2018 Report
Aspen Healthcare Forum, the public component of the 2018 – 2019 program editions, took place on 23 October 2018. Participants included high-level decision-makers from the Romanian Government, Ministry of Health, National Health Insurance House, Presidential Administration and WHO, as well as key representatives of the private sector and civil society, foreign and Romanian medical researchers and academics.
19 Iulie 2019•Written by Aspen Institute
The conference focused on three panels: Promises of Future Healthcare, Improving health coverage, better access to medical services and medicines and Health and finance, an indispensable partnership: healthcare as an investment, sustainability of health funding, getting serious about prevention.
Key Take-aways
➢ Adapting to the future of healthcare means focusing on prevention, innovation and ehealth.
➢ Health is first and foremost an investment: a shift must take place from focusing on costs to focusing on the value created.
➢ Tapping into private financing for the healthcare sector is a must, in the context of relatively limited public resources. The appropriate legislative framework for this needs to be put in place.
➢ The system needs should be connected with a sustainable and predictable growth of the health budget; multiannual budgets should be considered.
➢ Pricing policies for medicines are required to encourage affordable treatments for patients, but also to ensure medicines’ availability on the market.
➢ There is a huge impact of new technologies and AI on the healthcare sector. This poses challenges to public decision-makers in keeping the pace on regulating the sector.
➢ The commitment of authorities is essential in acknowledging innovation and in setting up a legislative framework supporting innovation.
➢ AI can help health systems move from cost-based to outcome-based models.
➢ Vaccination, as a most successful preventive activity, is essential for a sustainable and complete health policy. Availability of vaccines should be considered in public health and procurement decisions.
➢ Prevention includes many activities such as early health education, healthy lifestyle, early detection of non-communicable diseases and immunization. All these may prevent the use of expensive treatments, keep costs down and extend patients’ years of healthy life.
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