Krzysztof Łanda

Founder of Watch Health Care Foundation

Doctor. Long-term expert in the field of health economics ; in 1998-2002 he was Head of the Bureau of Standards in the National Center for Quality in Health Care ; co-founder of HTA Consulting ; in 2006-2007 Director of the Department of Drug Headquarters NFZ ; since 1998, he manages and has lectured in numerous training programs in the field of EBM and HTA ; He was also a lecturer at Kozminski University in Warsaw ; co- develop a methodology for the development of the creation, structure and the first entries in the basket of medical services in Poland in 2000 ; a former member of the Board of Health Technology Assessment International ; leader of the World Bank project for the Ministry of Health of Serbia , concerning the system of implementation of HTA ; author and co-author of many professional publications and textbooks .

Motto: health is a non-partisan

History of the Foundation

The Watch Health Care Foundation was established in 2010. Its creation was inspired by a growing discrepancy between the content of the guaranteed health benefits basket and the amount of financial founds from the basic insurance contributions, allocated for health benefits in Poland. This leads a painful deprivation or limiting of access to basic health benefits to the patients.
The WHC Foundation website was made accessible to users in March 2010. The register collects and presents reliable data regarding health care services and health procedures to which access is aggravated. Patients, the society, service providers, decision-makers and regulatory authorities receive free of charge access to aggregated information presented in the form of rankings.. We present information on how to use the register, as well as on our partners, supporting institutions, volunteers and friends. The website also enables viewers to contact the Foundation, reporting cases of limited access as well as solutions to the access problem, using the register and its history of entries.
We encourage you to explore the possibilities offered by our website!

The objectives of the Foundations are:

Indicating fields of inequalities regarding the access to health benefits;

Defining ways of changing the negative state of play regarding the access to health benefits in compliance with HTA principles;

Promoting the most clinically-effective, safe and cost-effective health technologies which marry with the limited financial capacity of the State in order to make them generally accessible to society;

Collecting and verifying reports, active tracking down of health care services and health procedures with limited access in Poland, presenting the aggregated information in the form of a ranking with regard to the difficulty caused by the limited access;

Promoting the idea of an additional health insurance as a form of supplementing the system of compulsory insurances, supporting the initiative aiming at developing the market of compulsory and voluntary insurances;

Supporting various external entities aimed at limiting the disproportion between the content of the guaranteed health services basket and the amount from the funds from the contributions for basic health insurance;

Promoting voluntary actions among citizens in order to create the feeling of property, responsibility and the importance of social initiatives, as well as establishing an activity model for future organizations of this kind in EU Member States in order to improve the quality and accessibility of health care.

Taking actions in order to organize and mobilize a broad social support for the benefit of collecting funds for the abovementioned needs;

The mission

The mission of the Watch Health Care Foundation is to provide the broadest, most complete and evidence-based information to decision-makers in the health care sector (among others The Ministry of Health, the National Health Fund) about the limitations in accessing basic health benefits;

The mission of the Foundation is also to provide trustworthy information to patientsregarding those benefits and medical procedures to which they can expect limited access;

Finally, the mission of the WHC Foundation is indicating health care services and medical procedures currently not included in the guaranteed health services basket to institutions which provide additional health insurances.

The Foundation’s vision:

The WHC Foundation is widely respected; it is an institution with a broad scope of influence whose website is a reliable and transparent source of information, both for patients as well as for decision-makers in health care.
The vision of the systematic changes, and therefore the coordination of the health care system, at which the Foundation is aiming is as follows:

• There should be no queues nor other limitations to accessibility to the most cost-effective, exceptionally effective and most needed health care services and medical procedures;
• The content of the guaranteed health benefit package balances with the amount of funds coming from contributions to the basic health insurance;
• There are additional insurance packages in the health care system which compete by offering various benefit sets not included in the guaranteed basket.

The Foundation is going to keep a health benefits register in two fields:

• Benefits included in the guaranteed package
• Benefits not included in the guaranteed package;

The guaranteed health benefits package includes a range of services (drugs, diagnostic, surgical, prophylactic, rehabilitating etc.) and health care procedures financed from public funds (from contributions to the basic health insurance) carried out by service providers (hospitals, out-patient clinics, etc.) for the benefit of patients insured in the public health insurance system.
On the website of the Foundation we will present health benefits (including drugs) which are characterized by high, unquestionable effectiveness and high cost-effectiveness in respect to the cost-effectiveness limits accepted in Poland, where supply is currently insufficient with regard to the most basic patient needs.
The WHC register aims mostly at helping patients who, in spite of paying basic health insurance contributions, rightly feel aggrieved due to limited access to basic, highly cost-effective health benefits.
A striking example eligible to being presented in the WTC register is lack of access to a low cost ultrasonography test in October 2009 with the health personnel’s explanation, that “there are no limits for ultrasonography left this year”, while at the same time the patient is offered a much more costly tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, as “we haven’t used up all limits there” – this regards a situation, when a much more costly diagnostic test is not necessary.
We believe that the social initiative implemented by the WHC Foundation will lead to abolishing or at least limiting one of the principal flaws of health care in Poland, namely queues to basic treatments. The WHC register will indicate those treatments, the access to which should be secured in the first instance and the access to which should in no way be limited.
The foundation also wishes to indicate those benefits which are particularly effective and which are not included in the guaranteed package. The register will also present effective benefits not included in the guaranteed package, practically unavailable within the basic contributions.