Joanne O'Gorman is an innovation
broker. As Director of the Edmonton Capital Health Authority's
Office for Health Innovation, companies come to her
to get their products and services developed and assessed
within the Health Authority. Success, for Ms O'Gorman,
is better care and productivity in healthcare plus —
and this is key — a product ready to be commercialized
and marketed in Canada and abroad. Her work exemplifies
a new concept of healthcare that aims not only to improve
health, but also to generate wealth for Canadians.
The idea was first bandied about
four years ago by Dr Henry Friesen, current Chair of
Genome Canada, and here's its logic: If we are going
to spend the huge sums that we do providing healthcare
for Canadians, why can't that spending double as an
investment in Canada's health industrial sector.
Dr Friesen and Ms O'Gorman were
two of about 120 high-level representatives from government,
health industries, research, provider and investment
communities who gathered at an invitational meeting
hosted by the Public Policy Forum on April 26-27th in
Gatineau. The point of this powwow was to put this partnership
plan into action.
POWER
BROKERS
Senator Yves Morin chaired the meeting along with former
Premier of Manitoba Gary Filmon, who's been touring
the country meeting with stakeholders since Jerry McDole
(then-CEO of Astra Zeneca) approached him about creating
a partnership along the lines of Dr Friesen's vision.
The April meeting was all about building a consensus
and deciding how to move forward.
Mr Filmon proposed a board of directors
co-chaired by one government and one industry appointee.
The other boardmembers would be drawn from federal and
provincial Ministries of Industry and Health, health
industries and their associations, universities and
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, venture
capital and private equity associations. The Prime Minister
and Chair of the Council of the Federation would be
in on the action.
WE'RE
TALKING REAL MONEY
After a first day of presentations and group discussion,
there was consensus on the need to move forward with
some urgency to take advantage of the opportunity at
hand. Every year governments in Canada spend $132 billion
on healthcare and $2 billion on health research, according
to Dr Friesen, yet Canada has a huge and growing trade
deficit in health products. He estimates that Canada's
reliance on health products from elsewhere creates more
than 60,000 jobs a year in other countries.
"Research and development in pharmaceuticals
dropped in absolute terms this year for the first time
in 12 years," says Andre Marcheterre, President and
CEO of Merck Frosst Canada. He feels changes to the
Patent Act in the 1990s helped matters some, but the
country still needs to take measures to improve competitiveness
in the business climate — or other countries will
leave us behind.
Meeting participants agreed that
the status quo — where Canadian researchers make
a discovery only to have foreign companies commercialize
it so we can buy it back — is a mess. They also
agreed we need this proposed partnership to better align
health and economic policies in Canada to propose regulatory
and legislative reforms that support innovation and
to coordinate ways of addressing commercialization opportunities.
Far from a threat to public healthcare,
the initiative seeks to put the public system to work
for private suppliers as a breeding and testing ground
for innovative products and processes. "We don't want
to mix up the privatization agenda and this one," says
Canadian Healthcare Association President Sharon Solzberg-Gray,
who attended the meeting, "but rather see the health
system as a positive driver and not just a drain."
AND
THE FRONT LINE?
At the meeting, clinical trials keep coming up as a
major avenue for development in Canada that could bring
money into our health science centres, attract investment
from major healthcare industries and even improve the
care provided by our public system. It is also an area
that cannot be pursued without the involvement of MDs
and other caregivers, who were conspicuously absent
from Mr Filmon's proposed board.
The Canadian Medical Association
(CMA) was one of the sponsors of the meeting, but association
representatives expressed some question about how providers
fit into the project. Marcel Saulnier, Director of Policy
Research at the CMA, wonders if health system capacity
would need expansion in order to meet the innovation
challenge. Ian Shugart, Senior Deputy Minister of Health
Policy at Health Canada, says, "those in the health
system are so preoccupied with managing that looking
up to see what would possibly help is difficult."
"Being a front-line provider, I'm
always suspicious when a healthcare project is discussed
without enough providers in the room," says CMA president
Dr Albert Schumacher. Nonetheless, he believes the CMA
will remain involved in the partnership because it has
much at stake in promoting healthcare innovation. "Physicians
are feeling the lack of new technology in the care they
can provide. Everybody else gets it licensed sooner,"
he says. "We're in this news blackout about new great
things elsewhere and there's no point in learning about
it if somebody isn't going to pay for it."
As a small steering committee composed
of the idea's original proponents — including Senator
Morin, Dr Friesen, Mr Filmon and Dr Aubrey Tingle —
distills the meeting discussion into a proposed Charter
to present to provincial and federal ministers in August,
providers should figure more prominently. "What started
out looking like an industry partnership at the beginning,"
says Ms Sholzberg-Gray, "changed over the course of
the meeting to end up with a consensus that all parties
have to be involved."
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