Earlier this year I attended the 3rd Annual World Healthcare Congress in
Barcelona. Many of the world’s healthcare leaders were there, including the Nobel
Prize Winner who co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières, Bernard Kouchner;
the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, George Halvorson, many European Ministers of
Health, as well as the heads of major healthcare organisations throughout Europe.

Many of the presentations focused on how to deliver quality healthcare in the
environment of an aging, more demanding population. Patients want quality
of care in whatever location they chose, whether that is while they “winter”
in their Spanish seaside villa or from their own National Health Service general
practitioner for the other six months of the year.

Viviane Reding, a member of European Commission, said that ICT is the only way
to control healthcare costs - by creating an intelligent environment for healthcare
professionals with information networks that cross regional and national borders.
For example, Denmark has instituted electronic prescriptions, and the savings
amount to 1 billion euros per year.

Reding advocates an electronic patient record (EHR) that allows “health
service roaming” much as our mobile phone systems do today. She wants
virtual testing of drug adverse effects, using the new virtual technology of
human functioning – and she believes that the mobile phone will become
(if it’s not already) the most cherished piece of technology that a person
can own.

China alone has 60 million new mobile phone customers per year, and in
the EU now the average number of mobiles per person is 103% -
i.e. more than one phone per person. (In Luxembourg it’s 175%!).

Vested interests of current stakeholders are the main barriers to an integrated
Pan-European network of healthcare. There must be a guarantee of personal
integrity of data – and others at this conference were advocating that only
patients themselves should control those data. Personal data security is a
primary EU value and there is already serious concern about the uses RFID is
being put to. However, Reding believes that there must be a balance
between development and security. Mass hysteria about a possible
“Brave New World” should not be allowed to hinder progress.

What could the pharma industry do to help maintain individual patient privacy
while also ensuring access to data? Perhaps investment in an independent
global authority for the protection of patient rights? The European Charter
of Patients Rights was a good first step – but what we need is some
mechanism whereby a patient can give informed consent for anonymised data
use, and be confident that any aspect of his or her healthcare that
they want to remain private does so.