TNMU Professor Took Part in the International Congress on Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research

On April 18-20, 2024, the Head of TNMU Department of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology of I. Horbachevsky Ternopil Ternopil National Medical University Oleksandra Oleshchuk took part in the 12th Adriatic and 8th Croatian Congress on Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (Lovran, Croatia).

The annual “12th Adriatic and 8th Croatian Congress on Pharmacoeconomics and Treatment Outcome Research” has become a landmark in the field of pharmacoeconomics and medical technology assessment in the European region and is an excellent platform for sharing research results and promoting the development of pharmacoeconomics, for communication and interaction, participation in discussing controversial and complex issues of the health care system.

President of the Congress Prof. Dinko Vitezik (Croatia) and Prof. Oleksandra Oleshchuk.

Professor O. Oleshchuk listened to the speeches of leading industry experts on such topical aspects of the organization of the health care system in the state as “Access to innovations, value and equality in decision-making in the field of health care”, “Readiness for the implementation of new changes in EU legislation”, ” Real data and information systems”, “Problems of the national patient access policy”, “Alternative pricing mechanisms as an opportunity for wider access to advanced therapies”, “Development and successful implementation of medical technologies after the decision to reimburse the cost of drugs”.

At the invitation of Professor Zoltan Kalo (Hungary), Oleksandra Oleshchuk took part in the workshop “Evidence based policy decisions to tackle infectious disease in lower income European countries” as an expert on the assessment of medical technologies in Ukraine.

In recent years, the importance of infectious diseases has increased, especially due to the COVID pandemic and problems related to antimicrobial resistance. The first part of the workshop presented an update on two European projects funded by the Medicines Innovation Initiative, VITAL (Vaccines and Infectious Diseases in an Aging Population) and ValueDx (The Value of Diagnostics to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance by Optimizing Antibiotic Use). The second part of the workshop was based on the example of an influenza vaccination strategy for elderly patients in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Identified barriers to evidence-based public health decision-making for expanding and optimizing seasonal influenza vaccination programs include low confidence in locally collected epidemiological data and limited relevance of foreign data due to varying health status of populations. Inadequate quality of available data on clinical burden may lead to insufficient use of health economic evidence in health policy decision-making. Identified barriers to economic modeling of optimized seasonal influenza vaccination programs in low-income European countries were reviewed, and pragmatic solutions and recommendations were sought on how to improve the evidence base for health policy decisions.

Participation in this congress is also an opportunity to provide truthful information to the world medical community about the real situation in Ukraine in the conditions of the war with Russia, to discuss the problems of the health care system and the need for drugs, medical products and equipment in wartime.

The information and photographs were provided by Oleksandra Oleshchuk.