The Health Impact Fund is a proposed pay-for-performance mechanism that would provide a market-based solution to problems concerning the development and distribution of medicines globally.
Therefore, "the Health Impact Fund would give companies incentives to develop new products targeting the diseases and conditions for which existing systems have failed to produce results, which would especially benefit the poor.
"[1] The allocation of pharmaceutical research and development effort is partly a result of the global patent regime established by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
[2] According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the pharmaceutical patent system needs an "alternative" that would "give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases like malaria that affect millions.
[4] In order to achieve distribution at cost, the Health Impact Fund could require generic licensing, tendering, or price controls, depending on the nature of the product.
As performance measurement is a core component of the Health Impact Fund, it needs to be robust across diverse products, patient demographics, and social and natural environments.
Create a comprehensive metric to evaluate the health impact of medicines based on the actual reductions in mortality and morbidity each achieves.
The Health Impact Fund can be seen as a development of Advanced Market Commitment, which also incentivizes new research while ensuring access at low prices.
[11] When the Health Impact Fund was proposed in 2008, it attracted criticism from Professor Brook Baker and Knowledge Ecology International for not requiring open licensing of registered drugs.
Jorn Sonderholm (2009) argues that there is a lack of evidence that patents create a barrier to access, so that the Health Impact Fund may fail to address a real problem.
[16] This is due to a misunderstanding about the nature of the Health Impact Fund, which addresses the problem that there are insufficient incentives to invest in vaccines and treatments for diseases that lack effective market demand.
[23] A new WHO Consultative Expert Working Group (CEWG) has noted that the Health Impact Fund proposal would benefit from a pilot to demonstrate feasibility.
Carl Nathan (2009) suggests that the Health Impact Fund could help to overcome obstacles to the control of tuberculosis such as development and distribution of vaccines and medicines to the poor.
[24] John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University, has complimented the Health Impact Fund for bringing moral imperatives and pragmatic market principles together.