The primary session of the EFPIA Health Collaboration Summit 2016 focused on tools that might be introduced to overcome the significant challenges faced by European health systems. Chief amongst these was unlocking the potential of value-based healthcare, focusing on the outcomes that people/patients really care about. There was also a call for patients to play a bigger roll in defining outcomes, given that it is the patient who experiences the illness/disease and not the regulator, the carer, the pharmaceutical industry or the patient advocate.

The second looked at how we value medicines in the context of an outcomes-focused healthcare system. The panel suggested five areas where partners in healthcare could collaborate, including: establishing a framework to define value; ensuring a commitment to new commercial models; promoting data infrastructure investment and policy change to support this; and introducing better planning/horizon scanning. There was also a warning that basing drug prices on development costs, would just encourage “inefficient development” rather than rewarding value. "Surely we want to reward new medicines based on what they deliver rather than how much they cost to develop," said Richard Torbett from ABPI.

The final session brought about the considerations that not only do outcomes have to be measureable, they must also be “standardisable”: so that they can be compared easily across regions and Member States. Prof Andrew Morris, Chief Scientist in Scotland underlined the importance of “collecting data once, using it often”. He went on to demonstrate the how using healthcare data in realtime is shaping and improving patient care.

Day one of the Summit culminated in presenting the Health Collaboration Awards for multi-stakeholder projects that address the needs of patients. The ethos behind the awards to share best practice and provide inspiration to people considering a multi-stakeholder approach to address the needs of patients. The winner the Health Collaboration Award 2017 -  Together for better health for us, by us, addressing the healthcare needs of the Romany community across Eastern Europe.