Innovation - Paving a New Way to Patient-Centric Healthcare, November 12
An overall interesting debate divided into one speech and two panels, part of the FT Future Healthcare Series coordinated by Financial Times and Philips, took place yesterday in Brussels. In a presentation of the Commission's priorities when it comes to healthcare, Ms Vassiliou, EU Commissioner for Health, underlined the HTA matter, health inequalities between member states and the patient-centric approach; while Ms Parvanova, MEP, focused on the need of private-public partnerships, Mr Figueras, Director at the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, discussed what choice really means and the crucial role of health literacy for patient empowerment (which did sound very familiar).
Most interesting though were the user-friendly formulas explaining or defining healthcare issues that arised during the discussion, such as "the shift from cUre to cAre" (Mr Smeets, Director General Association Internationale de la Mutualité or Ms Palkonen, Vice President European Patients' Forum) or co-payment associated to "the pressure of the wedding-list" (Mr Ruscitti, Secretary General Health and Social Affairs Department of the Veneto Region, Italy). An expression that will probably become mainstream in healthcare debates was the one used by Mr Smeets, "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll", when resuming the current challenges within the healthcare field. Sex as in ageing population, drugs for medicines being one of the biggest problems of every healthcare system and, last but not least, rock'n'roll as label for the process of patients turning into consumers and acting as such.
A video from the event will soon be available here.