For the first time in Saudi Arabia, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital held a symposium discussing health economics on Saturday and Sunday. The symposium was held in cooperation with Roche Company at the Jeddah InterContinental Hotel. Leaders in health care, hospital executives, doctors, and health insurance specialists attended the conference. Abdullatif Abdullah Al-Nugali, executive officer of administrative affairs at the hospital and chairman of the organizing committee, said that health economics is a new topic for the Arab world. “The branch of health economics focuses on finding the real cost of health services in an accurate and organized way, and consequently helps decision makers to make the right decisions,” said Nugali. The conference also focused on the best ways toward presenting the best health services at the least costs. “The conference aims to discuss methods to evaluate decisions related to health sources and presenting different choices for patients,” said Azza Raslan, chief of the internal review department and financial consultant at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. “One example is using a new medicine and evaluating its effect on patients and whether the cost of treatment will rise or drop,” she said. She added that the conference is aimed more at health care establishments than individuals. “The patients are certain to get the treatment they need, but what we want to discuss is the way they are getting, which we call treatment management,” she explained. “That includes deciding whether we should use the medicine first with the patient and how we manage his treatment.” The two-day conference hosted many world-renowned speakers, such as Denzyl H. Cain of South Africa, head of funding, health economics and pricing at Roche, and Ahemd Samir Zazaa, pharmaco-economics manager at the same company. “It's been an excellent experience so far, it is quite a new topic for health care institutions in Saudi Arabia,” said Cain. “Health economics is all about how we can use healthcare resources more effectively and that we have improvements in terms of budget.” “We also discussed more subtopics that have to do with budgeting, like cost effectiveness analysis and cost utility analysis, considered tools that hospitals and their administrators can use to make better decisions.” He added that “there is a lot of money available in the system and there is an excellent level of health care, but Saudi Arabia faces the same problem as every other country, and that is the rapidly rising cost of medicine.” “[The cost of medication] is always rising and changeable,” he said, “so the decision makers are increasingly faced with the issue of how to make rational decisions in the best interest of the patient while maintaining efficient use of their resources.” Zazaa said he saw in the conference an opportunity to make an initiative to introduce health economics into the Kingdom. “The door is wide open to enhance and improve the quality of health care in the Kingdom,” said Zazaa. “It is important for both the patient and the hospital, because more patients will have access to health care services.” American statistics show that by 2050, 20 percent of the American national income will be spent in health field. __
