March 29. 2024. 2:43

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Register now: Why we need more Europe, and experts, in tacking the implementation gap in cancer – Can.HEAL Stakeholder Event, 26-27 April, 2023


The conference starts in the form of setting the scene, which demonstrates, effective policy-making – and effectively influencing policy – depends on a clear-headed recognition that change is continuous in ‘access and diagnostics for all’ as well as public health genomics. This means that adaptability and the capacity to see opportunities in a changing landscape is vital if successful decisions are to result.

It requires the ability to discern how advances in human understanding of science and society can be mobilised to generate benefits for cancer patients as well as healthcare systems – and to see how the wrong choices can be harmful.

To register, please click here and to view the agenda, please click here.

The sessions that follow highlights that, advances in information technology, public health genomics and molecular diagnostics (incl liquid biopsies), are opening new horizons for health, in terms of personalised medicine so that we ensure that will keep the person in personalised healthcare.

Mastering these changes creatively, to exploit their disruptive potential, will have wide-ranging advantages for society as a whole. But central to the process is a recognition that a business-as-usual scenario will not lead to success. An adventurous approach through input from the cancer stakeholder community, open-minded and alert, will be necessary.

Ceaseless change can, if approached intelligently, be an opportunity for introducing new thinking more in tune with the future than the past to ensure that the implementation of the EU Beating Cancer Plan will be a success.

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The timing of this event is fortunate, but not accidental. The European Union is itself on the brink of important changes – organisationally, with the upcoming elections in 2024, and in strategic policy terms, with the debate echoing around the continent following the launch of the European Health Union, European Beating Cancer plan as well as the European Health Data Space.

Change – and change management — is needed to tackle this implementation gap. Responses are needed urgently to the classic conflicts, now grown critical, between demand and supply. All European countries face this common challenge, and efficiency gains in health and long-term care delivery for cancer patients will be needed to address the needs of an ageing population in an affordable way and to supply citizens with the improved levels of care and prevention that health innovation is increasingly making possible.

But division of responsibilities across different levels of government and levels of care are impediments, at national and at European level, to common recognition of the challenges, identification of common solutions, and implementation of effective action.

While advanced technology in health and informatics surge ahead, many health services are still struggling with obsolescent or incoherent attitudes and working methods – ranging from paper-based systems for patients’ health records to uncoordinated infrastructure and inadequate expertise in screening or data collection and analysis, and from disparate approaches to genetic testing to haphazard funding mechanisms for research, development and delivery of services and conflicting views on innovation.

Against this background, this event on April 26th/27th is a taking stock as well as call to action to maximise the potential benefits of change. It is intended to provide a compendium of evidence for the adoption of innovation in European healthcare through the different projects that the EU have launched linked to the flagships/missions as well the expertise across the cancer continuum.

What it will present is a review of the opportunities, the impediments, the successes, and the choices that could be made.

It is up to the actors themselves, in research, in healthcare, in policy formation and advice, and in the patient community, to guide policy-makers for the right solutions and to recommend how that can be done quickly, so that the inevitable changes ahead are managed for the benefit of society. It would be a tragedy if insufficient awareness of the stakes and of the opportunities were to muffle or blunt policy responses, leaving society as a victim rather than a beneficiary of change.

A vision for 2024 is at the heart of the event. Even where the therapeutic possibilities, public health genomics and molecular diagnostics are starting to be recognised, there is still only a limited perception of its equally significant capacity to reduce harm in the population and to allow a better quality of life.

Success could bring major benefits by 2025, by fully exploiting the potential of personalised health with a new vision of coherent strategies based around prevention, early detection, and treatment.

This will require full deployment of big data’s ability to modify what is possible in medical research and patient care, more effective leverage of new technologies to sharpen the impact of R&D on early diagnostics, and the extension of diagnostics to guarantee patient access to personalised healthcare. Closer collaboration of this sort between authorities will ease the demonstration of the value of personalised medicine, so that regulators, payers, and policymakers respond by incentivising innovation.

As with registering for this CAN.HEAL conference, the choice is available now. But it will not remain available indefinitely. Europe is living in a changing world, and if it does not choose to change, the world will change around it.

To register, please click here and to view the agenda, please click here.

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