Norman Ng, Director of Patient Advocacy and Public Affairs at Healthcare Thinkers, shared on LinkedIn:
“The Trilemma in Healthcare: Innovation, Fiscal Cost and Patient Access – How Can Policies Strike a Balance?
This article on the future of healthcare highlights a core challenge for global health‑policy circles: navigating the tensions and balance among innovation, cost and access.
Breakthroughs in medicines and medical technologies bring unprecedented therapeutic hope to patients. Yet cutting‑edge innovation often comes with steep R and D and manufacturing costs, placing substantial strain on healthcare budgets and reimbursement systems. Policymakers, industry players, payers and patient advocacy groups often hold divergent standpoints. We need to preserve incentives for corporate R and D and innovation, while preventing new therapies from becoming privileges for the few, so that clinically‑valuable outcomes can reach more patients in need.
The ideal healthcare system is not merely about pursuing state‑of‑the‑art technologies. It calls for building frameworks that foster innovation whilst closing the gap between novel technologies and patients, via instruments such as payment‑system reforms, multi‑tiered protection schemes and value‑based assessments. These three objectives are not inherently mutually‑exclusive, but they demand ongoing dialogue and multi‑stakeholder collaboration.”
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