Professor Elias Mossialos

Elias Mossialos is Cheng Yu Tung Chair in Global Health and Director of LSE Health. He was the founding Head of the Department of Health Policy. His primary research focus revolves around health systems and policy, with particular emphasis on healthcare financing, accessibility, quality, regulation, AI and digital health, pharmaceutical policies, AMR, and cancer and CVD care and policy.

Professor Mossialos has made significant theoretical and practical contributions across health policy, financing, and regulation. He developed the Options Market for Antibiotics (OMA), using financial call options to incentivize antibiotic R&D through early funding and guaranteed purchases while decoupling profits from sales volume. He pioneered cure-backed securities (CBSs), adapting securitisation to healthcare by structuring performance-based annuities for gene therapies. His research established theoretical foundations for health crowdfunding and community-based health insurance in low-income countries, integrating social capital theory with health financing analysis. He demonstrated how EU law profoundly shapes national health systems despite subsidiarity, and developed frameworks bridging institutional and political analysis to explain EU pharmaceutical policy-making. His research on healthcare quality revealed that off-hours hospital admissions increase mortality, while his oncology drug assessments questioned whether efficacy claims reflect real-world effectiveness. His work has been translated into Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Greek, and Spanish, comprising over 400 publications across public policy, health policy, health economics, and political science.

In 1998, Professor Mossialos co-founded the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, a major health policy research and knowledge transfer programme partnering the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, the European Commission, the governments of Austria, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, the French National Health Insurance Fund, the Veneto Region of Italy, the Health Foundation, LSE and LSHTM. He is currently Co-Director. He has been profiled in both the Lancet and BMJ, and co-chaired the LSE-Lancet Commission on the future of the UK NHS and the WHO Review Panel of the overall programme review of the global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property.

He has direct government experience, having served in Greece as Member of Parliament (2009-12) and Minister of State (2011), chairing the Parliament's Special Permanent Committee on Monitoring the Social Security System. Professor Mossialos has actively participated in policy debates, advising the World Health Organization, European Parliament, European Commission, World Bank, UK Office of Fair Trading, and Ministries of Health and Social Affairs in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain and Sweden, as well as health insurance funds in Croatia, France, Hungary and South Korea. He served on the management board of the European Medicines Agency (2000-2003) and contributed to the International Forum on 'Common access to health care services' coordinated by the health ministers of Sweden, the UK and New Zealand. He served as senior adviser during the Belgian EU Council Presidencies in 2001 and 2010, focusing on EU law's impact on health systems, and during the Swedish Presidencies in 2009 and 2023 and Dutch Presidency in 2016, emphasizing Antimicrobial Resistance. In recent years he was engaged by the State Council in China to advise on pharmaceutical policy reform, offered insights to the Austrian government on health insurance reform, and served as senior fellow to the Ministry of Health in Singapore.

In 2020-21 he was Scientific Director of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, an independent group convened by WHO and chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, to rethink policy priorities in light of the pandemic. His proposal to opt for value-based purchases of intellectual property rights or licenses from pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 vaccines was identified by Politico as the best option going forward. He advised the Greek Government on pandemic management and played an important role in communicating complex scientific issues to the public through regular media engagement.

In 2010, he received the Andrija Stampar medal from the Association of Schools of Public Health in Europe (ASPHER) for contributions to European public health. Other awards include the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, the 2002 and 2007 Baxter Awards for best publication in health policy and management in Europe, the 2022 Helen-Clark-JoPPP Award for Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice Research, and a Commended Prize in the 2002 BMA Medical Book Competition. In 2009, under his directorship, LSE Health received the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. He has been awarded Honorary PhDs by eight Greek universities: Athens, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the Universities of Crete, Ioannina, Thessaly, Peloponnese, West Attica, and Democritus University of Thrace.

Teaching

Professor Mossialos established the MSc in International Health Policy at LSE in 1999. In 2009, he developed a modular MSc in Health Economics, Policy and Management for mid-career professionals. In 2014, he launched a modular MSc in Health Economics, Outcomes and Management with the European Society of Cardiology and an interdisciplinary MSc in Global Health.

Affiliations

Department of Health Policy Director, LSE Health Co-Director, European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies

Expertise Details

Health System Governance; Financing Health Care; Pharmaceutical Policy; Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence; Innovation in Medical Technologies; Antimicrobial Resistance; Cancer and CVD Care and Policy