Elaine Murray
Public Affairs Lead, EIT Health Ireland-UK
Building the resilience and sustainability of health systems is not a new goal for the European Union (EU) and national governments. However, the COVID-19 pandemic was an eye-opener globally on the urgency to better equip healthcare systems for public health threats.
Despite health being a national competence for EU member states, the pandemic instigated fresh ambition for a coordinated approach. The adoption of the ‘European Health Union’ by the European Commission in 2020 elevated health as an EU priority in its own right. Additionally, the European Health Emergency Response Authority (HERA) was established, a new European Commission department focusing on crisis preparedness and response.
Innovation can improve disease prevention, accelerate personalised medicine, and facilitate access to care. Research conducted by EIT Health’s Think Tank spotlights a constructive path forward for EU policy action to drive sustainable healthcare systems through innovation.
Health system organisation
Through strategic investments, the EU can assist member states in building workforce capacity and skills. Public-private collaborations will become the norm. In 2023 EIT Health was selected as the coordinator of the Skills Partnership for the European Health Industry, an industry-led Pact for Skills in healthcare. Pact for Skills is a public-private collaboration to attract new talent and support the existing workforce through reskilling and upskilling initiatives to strengthen the sector’s resilience.
The pandemic highlighted the
immediate need for transformative
technologies to support public health.
Data and technology
The pandemic highlighted the immediate need for transformative technologies to support public health, with the role of data emerging as a key enabler to innovation.
A core building block of the European Health Union is the European Health Data Space (EHDS). This is a data-sharing infrastructure framework designed to give patients across Europe control over their own digital health information, including when they travel within Europe. The EHDS will also make large anonymised datasets available for research, innovation, and policymaking. This is the first of 14 common data spaces put forward in Europe’s Data Strategy (2020), which creates conditions for a single market for data.
Policy and funding
The renewed momentum for innovation in health post-pandemic is advancing policies set to make health systems more agile, and better equipped to handle future crises. EU policy frameworks to facilitate this include the EU’s AI Act (2024), and forthcoming Critical Medicines Act, Biotech Act, and Cybersecurity Strategy.
Additionally, the EU4Health Programme invests €5.3 billion into innovations focused on developing more resilient healthcare systems.
Overall, there has been a coordinated focus on health system resilience, met with policy initiatives, within Europe in recent years. Innovation has been recognised as a fundamental value to develop agile and sustainable systems for our future.
