Understanding how market innovation in healthcare works
Around the world, healthcare is in a rather unhealthy state. This is the result of several factors, including increasing prices and the fact that people are living longer but with more chronic diseases. “This creates a perfect storm where governments must stretch their budgets across a greater number of people, while many of those people find themselves either unable to access adequate healthcare or are unable to afford it,” says Susi Geiger, a professor of Business at University College Dublin. Against this same backdrop, healthcare as an industry is flourishing, with pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers seeing rapidly increasing profits. This juxtaposition is why healthcare has been called a ‘concerned market’. According to Geiger, a concerned market is characterised by the diverse interests of multiple actors: “These markets are not only concerning to many, they’re often also hotly contested,” she explains. Interestingly, those contesting the dominant market players sometimes try to work with them to make these markets better. “They don’t have a choice really, as these industry players hold the key to many essential medical innovations,” adds Geiger. But how do these types of collaborative market innovations, which span patient activists, state bodies and the healthcare industry, actually work? With the support of the EU-funded MISFIRES project, Geiger intended to find out.
Collaborative market innovation in healthcare
The project, which received support from the European Research Council, refocused the issues of market failures and market design from economic principles towards collaboration and participation in healthcare. “My ambition was to accumulate different cases of collaborative market innovation in healthcare to see what patients and other activists do on the ground, online and offline, to challenge dominant market players to become better at what they do,” notes Geiger, who served as the project’s principal investigator.
Understanding skyrocketing pharmaceutical prices and other healthcare challenges
The project investigated a range of problems and concerns inflicting healthcare markets. One of those issues is why pharmaceutical prices have skyrocketed over the past few years. Here, researchers looked at the ‘pharmaceutical transparency’ movement. The movement sought to compel pharmaceutical corporations to be more transparent about the prices they charge for new medicines, the R&D and production costs of these new medicines, and the intellectual property architecture behind them. “We followed the rise of this new form of activism and sought to understand its significance for the broader access to medicines movement,” remarks Geiger. Another case considered DIY medical device innovation, where diabetes patients created their own devices to challenge the industry to innovate. Further cases involved HIV/AIDS prophylaxis advocacy in Ireland and Kenya, as well as the use and commercialisation of genomic data.
Influencing healthcare policy discussions
This research served as the basis of 37 journal publications, a monograph, an edited volume and 51 conference papers. It also contributed to policy discussions in Ireland and at the World Health Organization. The project organised an exhibition featuring artwork created by people with long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome. “This project showed what research can do to help make markets more inclusive and to open them up to the concerns of those who are let down by them,” concludes Geiger.
Keywords
MISFIRES, market innovation, healthcare, healthcare policy, pharmaceutical, concerned market, patients, medicines, medical device
