On June 8, over 50 AmCham members and partners came together at Nordic Hotel Forum for a speaker breakfast with the Minister of Health and Labor Jevgeni Ossinovski to discuss the topic of the current healthcare system in Estonia and what are the future prospects.
The event was opened by AmCham President Indrek Laul and followed by the Minister’s keynote address. Jevgeni Ossinovski stated that the key for the innovative healthcare is data as our decisions are based on it. Data protection, however, is the core issue and the biggest challenge that Europe is currently facing. He also said that the Government has progressed in fixing fundamental problems and when it comes to the genome studies , there are no real obstacles for not doing that. Nevertheless, the biggest obstacle to mainstream innovation is the people. “The current system is not sustainable in its current form with the aging population and developing technology”, said Jevgeni Ossinovski. He also said that we have not been good at systematically analyzing the big amount of data we already have nor with collecting genotypes and linking them to existing health records. As long as we will not be able to agree on the common goals, we will not be able to achieve the progress. Besides being really careful with protecting the data, we also have to find ways of using the data in practical clinical situations.
The Minister’s speech was followed by a panel discussion that
featured Kadri Mägi from Roche, Taavi Einaste from Nortal, Raul-Allan
Kiivet from the University of Tartu, Kitty Kubo from Tehnopol, Kairit
Sildre from Johnson & Johnson medical devices, Tanel Ross from the
Estonian Health Insurance Fund and Minister Ossinovski himself.
The
panel was moderated by the Chair of the AmCham Healthcare Committee Elo
Tamm (COBAL Law Offices). The panelists expressed their opinions and
discussed the connections between the existence of data and practical
medical situations, possibility of personalized medicine, funding of the
innovative healthcare and the possible bottlenecks. It all came down to
a need of a high medical efficiency and the readiness to improve the
mindset and collaboration between all the industries and the
governmental institutions involved.
We would like to thank Minister Ossinovski for joining us this morning and showing the willingness to start the dialogue. A huge thank you to our panelists and Elo Tamm for the interesting and productive discussion! And of course a huge thank you to our member Nordic Hotel Forum for helping us to organize this wonderful event!
Photos by Marina Pushkar for AmCham Estonia (c)
