ESF-IfW Conferences

The overall objective of the series is to alert scholars, policy makers and private business worldwide to the great health-related investment opportunities that the rapid proliferation of medical technology and changing demographics will create in the course of the 21st century. To better understand these investment opportunities, a coordinated international and interdisciplinary effort of research is needed, in which medical scientists, health economists and other interested scholars join forces to initiate and foster the development of new research methodologies, of more effective strategies for the dissemination of research findings, of novel forms of cooperation to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from academic research into private industry and into the practice of health care, and of efficient policies for the mobilisation of the human and financial resources that the expanding global health economy requires.

The following broad set of questions motivates the formulation of themes for individual conferences in the series: What institutions must be developed in modern health systems to improve the incentives for investments in biomedical research and new technology? What rules and institutions are needed to fully exploit the opportunities for international cooperation in the development, evaluation, diffusion and adoption of new medical technologies, especially in Europe’s common market? How can health policy help to improve the coordination of private and public health-related investment decisions? How can the methods, research networks, and publication strategies that characterise specific fields be further developed to speed up the generation, evaluation, and application of medical knowledge to the benefit of all?

We believe that the European health economy and European health sciences have a unique opportunity to develop a sustainable new model that reconciles the goal of production efficiency with the principle of equal access to health care. A new model is needed because globalisation has both accelerated the world’s biomedical research and improved the conditions for the diffusion of new medical technology, while an increasing share of health spending in total expenditure has at the same time moved efficiency considerations to the top of the policy agenda everywhere. The analytical issues that these changes have raised were first addressed at the Kiel Institute’s 2005 conference on „New Technology and National Health Systems" which is extensively documented here.