Sheffield U. Management School, U. of Sheffield, UK, United Kingdom
In the rapidly changing world of today, healthcare is no exception in being constantly impacted by innovations and technological changes. Central to academic inquiries in healthcare has been the question of to what extent have innovations been effective in improving indicators of health in a society. In this article, we reevaluate the relationship between innovation and one specific measure of health, namely the burden of disease, in both high-income as well as middle and low-income countries. In doing so, we hypothesize and find an association between health-related patents and publications on one hand, and disability adjusted life years (DALYs), on the other. Using a panel data model on a sample of 70 countries from 2000 to 2019, we found that health-related publications significantly contribute to the reduction of disease burden across both OECD members and other countries. However, in non-OECD countries we found no significant relationship between health-related patents and disease burden, which could be due to weaker Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) protection or a limited capability of the healthcare system to capture value from innovations. We also find no association between health innovations and the reduction of disease burden in adults, despite a significant association in other age groups.
