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World Health Day approaching us on April 7^th is meant to raise awareness on the endless host of hurdles that undermines our health and therefore, our quality of life. Public health is about making sure that the external factors that determine our health are governed by policies that have people’s well-being at the very heart of their mandate. EPHA, Europe’s leading NGO advocating for better health, is committed to that very principle.

This year marks EPHA’s 20^th anniversary in advocating EU and European policy-makers on public health. Bringing today’s leaders to focus on people’s health is not an easy task. The medical devices and in vitro diagnostics files appropriately represent the juggling effort that advocating for public health usually turns out to be.

When we speak about healthcare in Europe, the word ‘sustainability’ is used often. From the outset of the economic crisis in 2008, policymakers, ministries of health, customers and payers all have focused on sustainable financial systems and sustainable healthcare systems – often as separate paths to achieve results. As budgets are shrinking, innovative ways to maintain current social and healthcare systems for the long term must be employed. At CleanMed Europe, a conference that brings environmental and healthcare issues together on the same agenda, I was pleased to see that a broader alternative discussion is emerging—one that marries financial and systemic sustainability in healthcare.

This week a very interesting group of people met on the last day of the ESC Congress (European Society of Cardiology) in Munich. Representatives of the Eucomed CRM Telemonitoring Working Group, individual member companies and leading representatives of the ESC came together under the chairmanship of the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) to officially launch the White Paper “Moving towards good practice in reimbursement of CIED Telemonitoring”.

Too often we, as stakeholders in health, forget about whom we are talking when we say “patients.” We talk as if the patient is somewhere far away from our discussions rather than the person with whom, about whom and for whom we are having those discussions. In reality, we are all patients – for some it’s just once a year and for others it’s every day of the year. But it’s important to remember that health policy should, theoretically, benefit all of us when it is our turn to receive healthcare – no matter what that care is.

My wife and I are part of the problem. Last weekend we ran respectable 10 kilometre times although we are both in the latter half of our fifties and we will play energetic tennis twice in the week ahead. Both had life expectancies in the early seventies at birth and now our risk adjusted life expectancies are straddle ninety years. We are a triumph for modern lifestyles and medicine (both having had interventions for conditions which may well have been fatal one hundred years ago) yet healthcare is the political scourge of our times. The success of society in increasing healthy productive years is matched by the failure of that same society to plan for such success in the provision of pension, health and social care. Yes, we have a financial crisis which has followed the profligacy of a generation but this is a minor issue compared to the need to rebuild our economic models to accommodate the demographic changes which us ‘baby boomers’ are so central to.

Just last week I was sitting in a presentation by a large Group Purchasing Organisation (GPO) which cited an Ernst & Young report in which hospitals had ranked their goals for cost savings. What struck me is how a majority of the surveyed hospitals want to reduce costs by cutting in the spending on medical devices. Why is this so striking? Because spending on medical devices, and more in particular medical device consumables, accounts for only 3% of total health expenditure, whereas spending on hospital organisation (internal processes, staff, …) accounts for 70%. So if hospitals want to reduce costs as efficiently as possible, can greater savings not be made in areas other than those that make up a minority of the total expenditure? And do we really want to slay the goose with the golden egg, the medtech industry, whose tremendous innovative capacity will be a conditio sine qua non for sustainable high quality healthcare for the citizens of Europe into the future?

eHealth is booming, hospitals, doctors, clinics, SMEs, big companies, everybody seems to be developing an app nowadays. It is great to see how many people are throwing their weight behind eHealth initiatives in every possible way: remote monitoring of demented senior citizens by means of image interpreting software, decision support systems, …, you name it. […]

Korn/Ferry International and Eucomed are co-organising the upcoming “How to differentiate in a changing environment?” conference taking place on 5 July 2011 in Brussels. We have worked closely together to design an exciting programme that will give participants a broad view on the future from a health economic point of view, but the various sessions will also discuss what hospitals are looking for from medical device companies. In addition, we have invited accomplished speakers representing other industries’ perspectives and experiences. In short, this meeting is designed to allow the exchange of experience and ideas, and see what is done in other industries to help medical device companies enhance their competitiveness and remain healthy businesses.

Chairing a two day conference on e-health and presenting at a groundbreaking Innovation in Healthcare conference put on by DG Research has further fuelled my enthusiasm for telling the story about the power of technology to enable massive changes to the way that populations are cared for, whilst simultaneously improving outcomes, the patient experience and cost. If all this seems too good to be true just look at what the alternatives might be.