Innovations in Healthcare: Present Opportunities and Strategic Partnering between Ireland and Finland
Tuesday 1 May 2007

(l-r) Mrs Mary Fitzsimons, Beautmont Hospital, Professor Miriam Wiley, ESRI, Prof Kari Harno, Helsinki University Hospital, Dr Ruth Barrington, HRB, Prof Per-Henrik Groop, Helsinki University Hospital, Prof Anne Scott, Deputy President, DCU, Prof Harry Holthofer, CBAS, DCU

A symposium entitled ‘Innovations in Healthcare: Present Opportunities and Strategic Partnering between Ireland and Finland’ took place in DCU on Wednesday 25 April 2007.

Mr Esko Aho, former Finnish premier and current president of Finland's National Fund for Research and Development (SITRA), outlined the models for progress in innovation that he believed would see Europe take a market leadership role in the effective administration of Healthcare. He presented the view that there are four key elements in a successful approach to a singular European solution to future healthcare needs. These pillars were identified as Investment in R&D, Education of specialists and citizens, Mobility and market creation via an open policy on Public and private partnership.

These same pillars were those that saw Finland become the model of excellence in innovation and R&D starting during recent years. In fact only Scandinavian countries, including Finland, can claim it matches the US and Japan for %GDP expenditure on R&D in Europe. This was a point that Mr Aho proudly presented, commenting that Finland cut expenditure in all areas other than R&D during the deep economic recess in 1990's and are now seeing the tacit benefits from this pan-political party decision.

Mr Aho sees programmes to develop topic areas such as e-Health and electronic patient records (EPR) as key to transforming the healthcare sector, which now consumes the largest part of national budgets all across Europe. With these kinds of innovative approaches, the challenges of ever increasing costs of healthcare, efficiency and better transparency can be achieved while helping to achieve global leadership in these areas of immense economic impact.

The other topics covered in the seminar included new approaches to contain the huge threat of diabetes and its complications using the meticulous work to collect clinical, environmental, genetic, life style and dietary data in databanks and using this data for translational research, as reported by Prof Per-Henrik Groop from Helsinki University Hospital.

Prof Kari Harno from the same university provided the roadmap to build a national electronic health record system to achieve higher level of efficiency, transparency and fluency of disease management and as a source for competitive national advantage.

Prof Harry Holthofer, of DCU, presented the essentials of funding from different European Union sources to build bi –and multilateral partnerships to achieve cross-discipline excellence particularly in the healthcare and other LifeSciences areas. This is urgently needed to utilise and develop best national expertise and get it connected to European networks and market channels. It was emphasized that the European Union funded consortia need multidisciplinary approaches to achieve their goals to utilise results from basic research seamlessly in the value chain developing new disease management processes and efficiency at all levels of healthcare.