The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

This year’s G8 summit is going to be held in Japan on July 7–9. G8 (The Group of Eight) is an international forum for the governments of eight countries that together represent about 65% of the world economy. The countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. G8 also represents the majority of global military power (7 of the top 8 positions for military expenditure, and almost all of the world’s active nuclear weapons.). Each year, the eight countries take turn to host the G8 summit meeting.

An article titled “Japan can draw on experience to drive action on global health systems at G8 summit” talked about how this year’s summit provides an opportunity to ask for global attention on improving health care. During the last G8 summit held in Japan, the Japanese government addressed important health-related issues such as infectious diseases, resulting in the emergence of a number of disease-specific initiatives. This year the focus is on health systems and ways to transform the growing consensus on the importance of health systems into concrete action.

Professor Michael Reich from Harvard School of Public Health and Professor Keizo Takemi from Japan’s Tokai University called for enhanced learning about health systems and an international research organization to coordinate the country-level health efforts. They also mentioned that global health partnerships should agree to allocate a set portion of their funding for Operational Research and knowledge discovery in health systems. Apparently, the importance of OR as a tool to enhance health care is increasingly being recognized internationally. After all, OR is about making the right decisions and optimizing systems. Health systems have many properties common for all systems. They are made of hardware (e.g. medical professionals, equipment, drugs) and software (e.g. finance, management, regulations). Furthermore, health systems are important platforms for the disease-specific initiatives to be implemented and coordinated.

References
“Japan can draw on experience to drive action on global health systems at G8 summit” by Lancet, RxPG News, Mar 06, 2008
“G8“, Wikipedia, Accessed Mar 08, 2008