Plenary Session Day 2

Wednesday’s plenary session looked at the challenges associated with enhancing the national environment for innovation with an emphasis on perspectives from low- and middle-income countries. Leading off the session, Dr Chen Zhu, Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China, provided an overview of the “Healthy China 2020” plan to reform the country’s health system and provide universal coverage. Zhu cited five key tasks to be completed over the next three years, including the construction of a basic medical insurance system, the establishment of a national essential drugs system, and the improvement of grassroots medical systems and making primary health care equally accessible to the more than1 billion Chinese citizens.
India faces equally staggering challenges as it strives to achieve universal health care coverage. According to Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairwoman and managing director of Biocon, an Indian biotechnology company, there is an urgent need to challenge the status quo, particularly given the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and increasing infant mortality rates. The key, she argued, is to strengthen “the digital backbone” of the developing world. While Cuba has achieved an impressive public health system, India represents a very different context; the same rules don’t apply. But India boasts several important strengths, including a young, educated population, increasing investments in science and technology, and a vast, highly sophisticated IT industry, which should be leveraged for health. While India’s challenges are immense—in the next year, the country needs 2 million new hospital beds at a cost of $200 billion—innovation can occur across the board through the scale-up of success stories, such as “micro health insurance.”
Al Hammond, Senior Entrepreneur in Residence at Ashoka, a US-based biotechnology company, discussed technological innovation in rural health care distribution (see blog). The only short-term solution to the chronic shortage of medical professionals in remote rural areas is to import them from urban areas using telemedicine technology. As broadband coverage catches up with that of cell phones over the next five years, linking patients with doctors or pharmacists via video will be easy and affordable. Still, significant policy barriers stand in the way of innovation; in most countries it is against the law to dispense drugs without a licensed pharmacist—even though that is tacitly ignored. It’s therefore imperative, Hammond says, that national governments revise the laws to allow for experimentation in telemedicine and telepharmacy.