The Remuneration Rights Fund would decide which innovator to pay. The fund identifies who to pay using to a great extent the same system as patents today. The level of remuneration received from the fund would reflect the health impact of the innovation (rather than grant market exclusivity).
The Remuneration Rights Fund would decide which innovator to pay. The Remuneration Rights fund would be governed by an independent body of which governance is independent of electoral politics and political faction. Governments would pool existing contributions into the fund, which would then have a fixed disbursable pool available for innovation funding each year. Once governments deposit their funds, they would no longer have control over the allocation of the monies, ensuring the independence and transparency in the operating of the fund as well as its impartiality. A funding body would be established to manage the remuneration rights funds.
The fund identifies who to pay using to a great extent the same system as patents today. We already determine who owns innovations. This process is central to the patent system, and could be substantially reappropriated under a remuneration rights system. Remuneration rights would be examined and issued much like patents, but new medical discoveries would be given remuneration rights, rather than patents.
In fact, remuneration rights cover the same sorts of innovation as patents, and would be delimited in the same way. To qualify for a remuneration right, innovators would have to prove that they were the originators of a particular medicine or treatment in the same way they currently do when applying for patents.
The level of remuneration received from the fund would reflect the health impact of the innovation (rather than grant market exclusivity) A remuneration right does not grant market exclusivity, and opens access to the information behind the innovation instead. In exchange, the Remuneration Right entitles innovators to be paid based on the impact of their innovation on health. More specifically, each year, the disbursable funds in the remuneration rights fund would be divided up among the holders of remuneration rights, in proportion to the health impact they created. Where innovators build upon the ideas of others, a portion of their remuneration right would be set aside like a royalty, to be delivered up to the originators of the relevant innovations. Health impact would be estimated using a predetermined and transparent metric. There are several examples of these metrics today, like the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) or Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY), which are used by institutions like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the WHO. A new agency (or department, such as the Food and Drug Administration), separate from the remuneration right fund, would be established to carry out the healthcare impact assessment that would be the basis for awarding funds.
