#EAPM - Health care gets the personalised touch in Poland

The Brussels-based European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) will today (5 March) play a key part in the 4th International Forum on Personalised Medicine in Warsaw, Poland, writes EAPM Executive Director Denis Horgan.

Organized by the Polish Alliance for Personalised Medicine, this edition comes under the umbrella ‘Key aspects of Personalised Medicine: Value-Based Healthcare and Value-Based Pricing.’

It is taking place at the Olympic Centre of the Polish Olympic Committee, in the country’s capital.

The Polish Alliance was established four years ago as part of EAPM’s SMART Outreach strategy which aims to have a solid presence at national and regional levels. Activities in Poland have been many and the collaboration is going from strength-to-strength.

Further national personalised medicine presences exist in Italy, while that country and Bulgaria and other EU member states have hosted Alliance-led events. The Outreach collaboration strategy is also particularly strong in Romania, Spain and Ireland.

It is particularly important this year, with Brexit and the upcoming European Parliament elections, that stakeholders engage politicians in the arena of health care. This event is geared towards doing just that.

Among the issues up for debate in Warsaw will be the EAPM-led MEGA+ strategy, as well as bringing innovation into the EU’s health-care systems.

In the first instance, the MEGA+ data-sharing initiative has already received an enthusiastic welcome from a swathe of member states and regions, and has clearly demonstrated a willingness to collaborate when it comes to data sharing in health care.

This is not only in genomic data, but is much broader. Various data sets could and should be shared, from hospitals, electronic health records, digital phenotypes, wearables, biobanks and many more resources available.

In fact the MEGA+ initiative extends to all medial data, to include imaging, eHealth apps, electronic health records, and more, all undertaken with the highest level of ethics and patient consent.

MEGA+ will include all valuable health-care data, with the activity having an emphasis on a ‘bottom-up’ strategy, using essential dialogue with the regions and healthcare actors who are the real driv-ers of innovation.

Ivo Gut, of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico de Barcelona, said of the initiative: “Among the many benefits that will be realised by MEGA+ initiative will be the creation of a co-ordinated, pan-European project that pull together crucial medical information together with high resolution diagnostic information and allow queries across a federated international systems.

“This resource will certainly have an immeasurable benefit when it comes to the health of current and future EU citizens.”

It is clear that such a project would achieve stronger cross-border research partnerships, the introduction of research results into clinical environment and practice, and vitally needed EU-wide research collaboration.

And it will build on existing national and regional personalised initiatives, strengthening cooperation among member states and regions of the EU, as well as the European Economic Area.

It will provide the opportunity to bring about distributed, authorized and secure access to national and regional banks of Big Data relevant to the advancement of research, while promoting the use of open standards and data management systems to ensure interoperability of the information.

Underpinning all of this will be the setting-up of a pan-European networked infrastructure for health information and undertaking the initiative as a coordinated effort across European countries with regions as the foundation.

EAPM’s activity in this area has an emphasis on a ‘bottom-up’ strategy, using essential dialogue with the regions and healthcare actors who are the real drivers of innovation. This also ties in with The Alliance’s SMART Outreach programme.

And in the second instance, part of the SMART strategy (SMART stands for Smaller Member states And Regions Together). This involves a clear focus on enhancing personalised medicine and embedding it into modern healthcare systems EU-wide, ultimately for the benefit of patients, their families, and wider society.

The over-arching goal is more equitable access to the best in healthcare, using ongoing leaps in innovation, the up-to-date skills of healthcare professionals, the EU’s diverse public health insti-tutes, and regional health structures.

On the ground in Warsaw

The sessions at the Warsaw conference will cover such topics as how to measure value in healthcare, standardization of outcome measures, personalised medicine and the increase of in-vestment in healthcare, and medicine of the future.

Sawomir Gadomski, the Under-secretary of State of Poland’s Ministry of Health, said ahead of the event: “The Polish government has been working hard to address issues in the country’s health systems which, as many systems are in the EU, is facing challenges in respect of ageing populations, a shortage of healthcare staff, and the need to educate healthcare professionals as well as potential patients.

“But we are confident of success down the line, and personalised medicine is certainly a key step on the road to this eventual outcome. This is why my ministry is more than happy to support the much-valued efforts of this event and its participants.”

And Beata Jagielska, a president of the Polish Alliance for Personalised Medicine and a key leader in this 4th International Forum, added: “As Mr Gadomski says, Poland is facing health-care challenges in the same way that the whole of Europe is. It is a fact that health-care systems across the EU need to be made more sustainable and the incredible science under-pinning personalised medicine can be a game changer in this respect.

“Not only are the possibilities now here to bring the right treatment to the right patient at the right time, but huge possibilities also exist when using new tools and unimaginably large amounts of health-care data, not only for diagnosis and treatment, but also for prevention.”

Also speaking in Warsaw,  EAPM Executive Director Denis Horgan said: “As we are hearing, all member states are working hard to keep ageing populations healthy and their health systems systems sustainable.

“But the rise of personalised medicine, based on great leaps in sciences such as genomics, can go a long way towards easing the burden, not just in Poland, but across all EU borders.

“Implementing these advances in the optimum way is what the forum is all about,” Horgan added.

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