IrRADIARE, Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Engenharia e Ambiente, Lda
IrRADIARE
IrRADIARE advises public authorities, urban, regional and local, on innovation, financing, funding, technology and procurement, and on European relations.
ID: 422154931291-94
Lobbying Activity
Response to European Partnership for innovative health
14 Aug 2019
We firmly believe that a European Partnership on Innovative Health could give a tremendous contribution towards the sustainability of the European Healthcare system. Option 2 seems the only viable pathway to give a considerable push in this direction. There is a huge necessity to bring together SMEs, large companies, public/private healthcare providers and end-users in a legally safe cooperation and co-development environment, to overcome the challenges mentioned in the Inception Impact Assessment. If properly designed, such environment could combine the European industry potential in the healthcare sector with demand-side and patient-oriented requirements.
Concerning the objectives of the Partnership, we would like to underline that it should promote a shift from reactive treatments to prevention, through a proactive and predictive care. Prevention can be considered an optimal approach for a better healthcare system, with evidence supporting this claim: a 2016 study published in Population Health Management showed that personalised and preventive care resulted in “definitive cost savings and better health management within three years of adoption”. However, the World Economic Forum indicates that countries continue to underinvest in prevention, with some professionals believing that a shift is still far from taking place, despite agreeing that this should be their main focus.
To do so, the Partnership should focus on data management and analysis. Indeed, a patient-centred medicine requires the identification of patterns in huge data sets of genetic information and medical records, looking for mutations and linkages to disease, making data mining and data-storage and analysis technologies essential.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions must be taken in serious account and actively promoted. The necessity of AI in healthcare is related to the complexity of modern medicine, which involves the acquisition, analysis and elaboration of a copious amount of information and the limitation of human intelligence in dealing with all these needs. AI applications, due to their advanced computing ability are overcoming these limitations and made available several techniques to assist clinicians in medical care. AI is revolutionizing how the health sector works, from hospitals to clinical research, drug development and insurance, reducing spending and improving patient outcomes. As any major technological change, this is expected to bring significant social benefits, but it will pose also new challenges, above all regulation. Indeed, to foster the development and uptake of AI, it is necessary to develop a regulatory framework, from both the legal and ethical perspective, in which it can act, so that citizens can trust the way their data are managed, and firms can invest on these solutions.
Read full responseMeeting with Carlos Moedas (Commissioner) and
25 Jun 2019 · Regional Innovation Scoreboard