On April 7, AmCham Healthcare working group held an introductory meeting with Aris Kasparans, Director of the National Health Service of Latvia to inform him about the healthcare projects conducted in 2020 and planned projects in 2021: Oncology Data Registry; Digital Health Strategy; Legal Framework for Secondary Use of Health Data; Health Data Summit and Value based healthcare approach. 

Mr. Kasparans informed that the National Health Service in cooperation with the Ministry of Health is planning to launch a new Digital Health IT System. It will be a healthcare management system using modules from the existing system. They will go public about it in the middle for April and are open to collaborate with all stakeholders who are willing to extend suggestions in co-creating this new IT system. They are planning to UX/UI professionals as facilitators and use a hackathon approach by inviting numerous stakeholders including those from the IT and healthcare sector.

In addition, the National Health Service and the Ministry of Health are planning to hire external facilitator to drive the Oncology data registry improvement process. They will be creating a separate working group for the Registry project and Mr. Kasparans promised to propose AmCham as one of the stakeholders to include in this group from the very beginning taking into account the results of the Oncology project conducted by AmCham in 2020.

Mr. Kasparans admitted that the Latvian healthcare system is underfinanced in comparison with other EU countries. He asked AmCham to extend support to increasing public healthcare budget. He also mentioned the recent campaign by the pharma industry association showing the need for increasing financing and close gaps related to the compensation medicine budget. His personal opinion was that the last year’s budget allocation for healthcare was not proportional and the process should be more balanced taking into account not only salary increase for healthcare professionals, but also improved access to services and increase of medicines compensation budget.

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