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Denis Horgan: Practical policy options to tackling the implementation gap for diagnostics

Photo taken from Denis Horgan/LinkedIn

23/10/2023 17:31

Denis Horgan: Practical policy options to tackling the implementation gap for diagnostics

Denis Horgan, Executive Director from the European Alliance of Personalised Medicine (EAPM), shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Day 2 of the EAPM Presidency Conference in Madrid points to practical policy options to tackling the implementation gap for diagnostics

Madrid, Oct 21st, 2023: The second day (Oct 20th)of EAPM Presidency posed and answered many questions provided across the range of cancer diagnosis and treatment. It highlighted the rapid evolution that continues in tackling this monumental challenge to health. But what the proceedings also revealed was the continuing gap between potential and realisation. The scope for improving health is limited not only by the intrinsic complexities of disease, but by the persistent lack of adequate frameworks for turning possibilities into practicalities. The outcome is often that invaluable innovations are insufficiently developed or deployed, depriving patients of benefits that might in a better-organised world be available to them. As has become a familiar mantra in healthcare, a therapy that never reaches the patient is of little value.

In many respects, healthcare suffers because the allocation of resources remains sub-optimal. More effective integrated approaches to care are often neglected. And the tendency within healthcare of operating in isolation rather than in collaboration still blunts the ability of science to influence the all-important policymaking sphere that dictates so much of the entire healthcare context.

The event was devoted largely to exploring how policy can play a fuller role alongside science in turning potential into personal care. Over the course of five debates, EAPM tackled the evident implementation gap and explored how resources might be better allocated and links more helpfully established. These well- attended debates – with more than 120 attendees – covered leading-edge issues, ranging from novel complementary biomarkers to accelerating the development and validation of liquid biopsy, and from tackling mantle cell lymphoma cancer and pancreatic cancer to anticipating the future to accelerate change in healthcare management.

In each event, the discussion centred on the role of innovation and the impact of technology in bringing benefit to patients and citizens. The underlying theme was the sharper definition that technology progressively brings, to the accuracy and precision of diagnosis, the development of treatment pathways and of patient monitoring. In concrete terms, for example, the development of science has avoided unnecessary surgery for breast cancer patients.

These events demonstrated clearly the role of EAPM as a bridge to policy makers, based on its expert input from the broadest range of healthcare actors.”