The health innovation system is ’broken’ and failing patients

NHS patients are being let down by a global health innovation system which fails to deliver the treatments they need at prices that government can afford, according to a new report led by Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), in collaboration with STOPAIDS, Global Justice Now and Just Treatment. The report, The People's Prescription: Re-imagining health innovation to deliver public value , warns that health innovation is being hampered by a drive for profit and calls for a major overhaul of the system to ensure that more drugs and treatments are developed for critical health needs. Crucially it addresses both the rate and the direction of innovation. Although innovation in health is vital for the development of drugs used by the NHS and healthcare systems around the world, the report finds that the current system for developing drugs incentivises high prices and delivers short-term returns to shareholders, rather than focusing on riskier, longer-term research which leads to critically needed therapeutic advances. The authors warn that the high prices of medicines are causing severe patient access problems worldwide with damaging consequences for health and wellbeing. The solution is not as simple as demanding lower prices but to understand how the characteristics of the system must be overhauled, from the dynamics of patents which are hurting transparency and collaboration to the ways in which corporate governance hurt innovation.