An innovative approach to the provision of healthcare

Policy experts at UCL are reimagining the provision of health to maximise public value not profit, and influencing health policy across the world.

The challenges facing public health provision are well known but poorly understood. A report published by the UCL Institute of Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP) sets out the problems with the current approach to innovation within the world’s health system. 

‘The people’s prescription: Re-imagining health innovation to deliver public value’ proposes ways that public, private and non-profit sectors can come together to increase the rate of biomedical innovation and direct it towards the areas most needed to create public value.

“Health innovation is about making new treatments and cures available to the people that need them,” says the report’s lead author Professor Mariana Mazzucato, IIPP Director. “Profits might be earned, but not at the cost of doing what the health system is meant to do: heal.”

The IIPP wrote the policy report in partnership with Global Justice Now, Just Treatment and STOPAIDS, with support from the Open Society Foundations.

““Governments should govern the health innovation process more like a market shaper: steering innovation, getting fair prices, ensuring that patents and competition work as intended, setting conditions for reinvestment, and safeguarding medicine supply.”

A wide range of critical health needs are either not being met or are sidelined, in high-, middle- and low-income countries alike,” argues Professor Mazzucato. “A system driven by profits ignores diseases prevalent mostly in the global south, such as tuberculosis, which kills millions.”

The report begins by outlining the key problems heath innovation is facing. It cites the current process of drug development, which fails to explore potential medical pharmaceutical avenues because they are non-patentable or less profitable, and gives a lower priority to non-drug interventions like lifestyle changes or improvements to surgical techniques.

It goes on to consider solutions, including an alternative ‘mission-oriented’ model of health innovation. “Governments should not be limited to ‘fixing market failures’ – financing high-risk basic research where private investments are scarce and regulating high prices after they have been set,” argues Professor Mazzacuto.

“Instead, Governments should govern the health innovation process more like a market shaper: steering innovation, getting fair prices, ensuring that patents and competition work as intended, setting conditions for reinvestment, and safeguarding medicine supply.”

Since its launch in 2018, the report has influenced health policy around the world, including forming the basis of the UK Labour Party’s pharmaceutical policy in 2019.