The Healthcare Innovation Race: Transparency and Collaboration versus Distrust (a Boardgame)
The Healthcare Innovation Race: Transparency and Collaboration versus Distrust (a Boardgame)
Submitter: Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin, ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie
Abstract:
To ensure that healthcare innovation corresponds to the interest of the patients and that fair and equitable benefits arise, pharma companies have to be transparent in their business practices and listen to patients’ needs: this is also important for patient trust, a vital engine in medical research and in the pharmaceutical market. This exhibit aims to stimulate reflection on the deep meaning of collaborative approaches to healthcare innovation and the role of transparency and trust by engaging participants with a collaborative boardgame set in the context of the pharmaceutical industry, readapted from the boardgame “Riese Gobrian”. The game is played with the general principles of a goose game, but the players have to collaborate with one another as they only win if all the players (symbolizing different stakeholders: patients, pharma companies, payers, healthcare providers) reach the finishing line (that is: if everybody benefits from market access to a new therapy), without being swept away by “Distrust”. “Distrust” moves forward at every turn and eliminates the pawns it reaches, unless the players strategically place “transparent agreements” on the board. There are lessons built into the game on medical innovation, the collective good, patient and public involvement, the role of patents.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation, Social Movements and STS, Medicine and Healthcare
Authors/Participants: Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin
Susi Geiger, University College Dublin
