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Trans-Atlantic Dialogues on Healthcare
"American & German Healthcare" is a forum for transatlantic dialogue and contact between policymakers, industry, healthcare providers, insurers, managers, patients, and members of the media on specific healthcare issues.
Today’s medical science and research are global. Scientists from everywhere in the world exchange ideas and communicate with each other at international meetings, in scholarly journals, and on the internet. Their global dialogue spurs the development of new knowledge and assures progress in medicine. However, all advances in medical science and research become accessible to patients only as citizens within the context of a particular national health care system. Each country has developed specific mechanisms to resolve this transfer issue but international exchange concerning healthcare delivery is still in its infancy and lacks institutional forms.
"American & German Healthcare" provides a platform for this kind of exchange across the Atlantic at a moment when the health care systems in the world’s most industrialized countries face increasingly similar challenges. The United States and Germany both confront changing demographics, rising health care costs, and citizens' demands for longterm viable systemic solutions. At the same time, the two countries have different strengths. The United States has the world's largest health care market and is, of course, a major center for medical innovation. German biomedical research operates on a comparable level, but its health care system is marked by some striking differences with the USA. Germany provides open access to medical care to all its citizens in a system based on private providers operating within the framework of nationally-supervised insurance.
Occurring annually, "American & German Healthcare" builds on three years of successful forums. The conversations between American and German experts at those meetings demonstrated the great potential of an ongoing transatlantic dialogue on critical health care issues. The comparative approach sharpens participants' understanding of their own system's unrealized opportunities.
An ongoing exchange of experiences between the two countries promises to be productive and of far-reaching importance not only for Germany and the United States, but also for 21st-century healthcare worldwide.