Digitalisation of health care and life sciences is one of the most important topics in all developed countries, including the Czech Republic. However, how exactly will the digitalisation of the Czech health care industry be carried out? How will legislation handle all the unavoidable innovations and changes? All the current issues were discussed at our traditional conference focused on the future of the health care and pharmaceutical industries.
The first guest of the Deloitte conference was Filip Vrubel, Deputy of the Health Minister Adam Vojtěch. His topic was the strategy of the Ministry of Health for the upcoming decade, especially in relation to the introduction of the “eHealth act” that focuses on digitalisation of health care: “The term eHealth has become a hot topic in the last few years, but everyone understands it differently. (…) At the ministry, we understand this term as an architecture and a set of communication standards that we want to achieve,” explained Filip Vrubel. The Act mainly focuses on electronic patient identification, the ePreskripce (electronic prescription) and eNeschopenka (electronic sick certificate) projects, and cross-border cooperation.
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Karen Taylor, a Deloitte UK health care specialist, focused on AI and new research procedures. In her talk, she introduced the study Ten years on: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation 2019, which focuses on the effect of innovations on health care and pharma and their impact on the future of this industry. Deloitte’s research suggests that there are three main results of the implementation of AI into medicinal products development: acceleration of medicinal product development, increased development efficiency with respect to the safety and effectiveness of medicinal products, and increased number of medicinal products that are being developed simultaneously.
Václav Franče, a Deloitte economic expert, introduced a macroeconomic point of view on the future. “Although the economic cycle has already peaked and some industries are already showing the signs of recession, the health care and pharmaceutical industries are almost unaffected,” he said. The reason for this are the strong particularities of the industry and the fact that in the prior recession periods, this industry underwent no major changes. However, other factors could affect the economic situation, such as business relationships after Brexit, escalation of business wars or pressures on the rise in labour costs due to the lack of employees.
Michal Vondraš, CEO of Medtronic Czechia, a company whose activities involve the manufacturing of pacemakers and other tech innovations, returned to the topic of health care evolution. Vondraš emphasised the importance of registers and active patient data processing, which is necessary for innovation development and strategy, as well as for cooperation with other health care providers, doctors or the state. Brandon Eychaner, a consultant from the Analytics and Information Management team of Deloitte Czech Republic, continued with the topic of data processing. According to him, AI is of utmost importance, as it will be able to record information from all kids of sources and in all forms, subsequently process it, and in more simple cases even come up with follow-up measures. Brandon Eychaner believes that chatbots could be the future of interaction with patients.
What does the law say?
Tereza Davidová, Attorney-at-Law at Deloitte Legal, tried to answer the question of how legislation will handle all the innovations and changes in health care, as the area of regulation is her expertise. Of course, the upcoming changes are reflected in legislation, which is why it reacts by introducing specific measures, e.g. the current amendment to the Act on Medicinal Products (to ensure availability of medicinal products), regulation of medicinal product advertisement, introduction of a medicinal products log (for the purposes of sharing information on the medicinal products used by the patient with doctors and pharmacists), or the Act on Vaccine Injury Compensation. According to Tereza Davidová, one of the biggest challenges for 2020 is the digitalisation of health care, optimisation of distribution models, and compliance.
The conference was concluded by a joint presentation of two experts from Deloitte Czech Republic – Alena Wágner Dugová from the Tax Litigation team and Michaela Lounková from the Tax function. The main theme of their talk was prevention and evidence. They shared some tips with the audience on how to prevent potential problems. Health care and pharma entities often make mistakes in the areas of VAT rates, litigation, expat taxation or tax compliance.
Are you interested in the future of health care and life sciences? Read our studies 2020 Global Health Care Outlook and 2020 Global Life Sciences Outlook and learn all about the upcoming trends that will dominate the industry.
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