Final Report Summary - REWARD (Performance-based Innovation Rewards) The project REWARD was set up with the aims to: undertake in-depth, global research into performance-based reimbursement (PBR) in order to establish a best practice benchmark; analyse possible ethical objections to previously benchmarked PBR tools and develop ethically sound refinements; analyse possible legal impediments to the implementation of previously benchmarked PBR tools and recommend legally sound refinements; and, move from clinical trial data to the real world by testing the ethically and legally sound PBR tools in both a developed and a developing country setting.The project developed a system of innovation process in terms of how innovations are rewarded and incentivized. The main method of incentivising innovations is by granting the innovators (e.g. the pharmaceutical industry) a temporary monopoly (usually for twenty years) that enables them to set the pricing of the product and collect licensing fees. The project researched alternatives to this standard approach and focused on a performance-based reimbursement mechanism (the Health Impact Fund) that allows innovators to register particular innovations for participation in publicly funded reward distributions. The innovators are rewarded according to the assessed impact of their registered innovations, provided they agree to forego said licensing fees and mark-up, i.e. supply their product at the cost of manufacture and distribution. The REWARD project also worked on a methodology to measure the impact of the pharmaceutical product and assessed the implementation of this reward system with key stakeholders from policy and industry in Europe and India. The project's work in a country with particular challenges in quality health data acquisition (India) has resulted in the development of e-health applications that are of particular importance for innovation research in developing countries.
