Professor Giorgio Alleva, Former President of the Italian National Institute of Statistics, discusses the policy dialogue surrounding patient access to ATMPs across Europe
All potential, eligible patients have the right to access Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs), and national health budget constraints cannot be a barrier to this. Nowadays, traditional reimbursement and budgeting schemes are unable to amortise the value of the ATMPs, whose costs and benefits are not aligned. These types of therapies need new and different payment and accounting methods, which consider the high initial costs and the large and lasting benefits over time, both for the patients and the national health systems. It is time for an institutional mindset change to classify ATMP expenditure as an investment and not a cost which is possible if a decision is taken to review – from Eurostat downwards – the economic/financial classifications of healthcare expenditure currently in force. Endorsed by 43 Patient Advocacy Groups (PAGs) this was – in synthesis – the key message sent to European and Member State institutions during the Active Citizenship Network event which took place last October. It sought to leverage the potential of advanced therapies for a large number of European citizens in compliance with the budget limits which healthcare has been paying almost all of Europe for some time. Kindly hosted by a member of the European Parliament, Tomislav Sokol, and supported by the MEP Interest Group ‘European Patients’ Rights and Cross-border Healthcare’, the initiative has been promoted under the patronage of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU and realised with the unconditional support of VITA (Value and Innovation for Advanced Therapies coalition). To better understand this proposal, which aims to make an expenditure for advanced therapies no longer a current but investment expenditure, we spoke to one of the experts who drafted the proposal made to the European institutions, Giorgio Alleva, Professor of Statistics at the Sapienza University of Rome and former president of ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics).