5.P. Scientific session: Towards a more needs-driven healthcare policy and innovation system

Abstract Despite healthcare advances, significant unmet health-related needs persist across Europe due to predominantly supply-driven pharmaceutical development, methodological limitations, and lack of consensus among stakeholders on defining these needs. Consequently, healthcare policy decisions and intervention reimbursements often fail to align with patient and societal priorities. This workshop addresses a critical question: Why and how should healthcare policy and innovation become more needs-driven to effectively satisfy the highest unmet health-related needs? Four complementary presentations explore methodological and practical pathways forward. First, the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE) will introduce the NEED (Needs Examination, Evaluation and Dissemination) initiative, providing a transparent and flexible framework for comprehensive unmet needs assessment. The session outlines a standardized protocol for collecting and synthesizing evidence on unmet health needs, optimizing comparability across conditions, and ensuring robust evidence for policy decisions. Secondly, the European Patients’ Forum (EPF) highlights patients’ essential role in defining unmet health-related needs. EPF will present patient-centered criteria and recommendations for systematically involving patients in research, regulatory processes, and healthcare innovation. Leveraging patient experience data ensures healthcare solutions genuinely address priority patient needs. Thirdly, WHO Europe emphasizes population-level data's role in informing needs-driven health policy, focusing on noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Using the WHO STEPS surveillance approach, standardized data on NCD risk factors and burden will be demonstrated as crucial for identifying unmet needs and guiding targeted public health interventions, especially for vulnerable populations. Finally, researchers from KCE and Sciensano will share practical insights from integrating Belgian health data into the NEED database, which consolidates unmet health needs data for various conditions. They will discuss strengths and challenges in critically appraising existing data sources, highlighting significant gaps, especially in healthcare and social domains. Their findings underscore the importance of comparable, reliable data for comprehensive needs assessments and evidence-based policymaking at national and European levels. Collectively, these presentations underline the necessity of a transparent, systematic methodology to assess unmet health-related needs. A coordinated stakeholder approach-including patients, healthcare providers, policymakers, and international collaboration-can foster equitable, effective, and sustainable healthcare systems. Key messages • Current healthcare innovation insufficiently addresses patient and societal unmet needs, causing inefficiencies, neglect of less profitable health areas, and persistent healthcare gaps. • There is an urgent need for robust, systematic methodologies - such as the NEED approach - to scientifically assess unmet needs, inform policy decisions, and guide meaningful healthcare innovation.