This session of the 2015 round of Aspen Seminars for Leaders focused on the key role of health and wellbeing in ensuring Italy’s development and prosperity. It was noted, in this regard, that medicine has taken incredible strides in recent years thanks to new discoveries, a case in point being the advances made possible by the mapping of the genome, which enable diseases that were untreatable up until a few years ago to be successfully fought.
This was seen as militating against framing any debate on health solely in terms of expenditure, and underlining the need to examine the issue from the point of view of investment. Indeed, the health sector was characterized as offering a great opportunity, due to the positive impact it can have both on the welfare of citizens, and on the country’s growth through innovative processes and skilled human capital. Moreover, Italy’s pharmaceutical industry, having been the only manufacturing sector to grow during the crisis, was held up as a continuing market leader in production, quality and exports.
It was acknowledged, however, that the advances made by medicine are confronted by health systems in Western countries plagued by increasingly less sustainable costs. While Italy spends the least on health among the European countries, it must nevertheless contend with the question of how to make its universalistic system sustainable, by exploring user-pay mechanisms aimed not only at financially restabilizing the system, but also at ensuring equitable access, while at the same time overcoming the excessive fragmentation of the health service into discrete regional systems.
The participants emphasized the need, after decades of unimplemented proposals, to invest in both short- and long-term prevention, by promoting a healthier lifestyle. This was viewed as requiring painstaking efforts, which should come into play before birth, and accompany citizens throughout their lives, entailing careful counseling apt to anticipate and reduce the incidence of diseases.
A clear link was drawn between prevention and education, giving rise to a need for efforts to promote physical and mental wellbeing among younger generations, taking into serious consideration the problem of substance abuse, towards which it was too deemed too little attention has been paid. Another area judged as key in this regard was the issue of training, with skilled human capital seen as constituting a formidable resource in the promotion of health. It was conceded that Italian researchers continue to exhibit very high levels of productivity, conducting clinical research that ranks foremost in Europe. There was nevertheless a perceived need to overcome the problems that still characterize university-level training and research in Italy, by incentivizing the active development of ideas and patents, and nurturing entrepreneurship beginning from university lecture halls. To achieve this, it was seen as necessary to free Italian academia from the shackles of the cumbersome rules, lengthy lead times, and red tape of the public administration, fostering partnerships with the private sector instead.
Finally, it was suggested that a less hidebound and more competitive university research system would also help the healthcare system to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities posed by technology. Big data, in particular, was singled out as offering scope for improving the collection of health information, thereby facilitating more effective care measures and reducing costs. The participants stressed, however, that this will require a change in the relationship between patients and health professionals, which must provide adequate assurances with regards to the collection of sensitive data and the protection of privacy.