Drug reimbursement in Finland—a case of explicit prioritising in special categories

Governing drug reimbursement policy in Poland: The role of the state, civil society, and the private sector

“…Despite its importance, social processes underpinning the development of drug reimbursement policies have attracted only a limited amount of social science research, with notable exceptions including Abraham (2009) for the United Kingdom and Vuorenkoski et al (2003) for Finland. Scholarly interests have concentrated on other aspects of pharmaceutical policy, especially methods of influence used by the pharmaceutical industry to maximize its profits.…”

Health technology prioritization: Which criteria for prioritizing new technologies and what are their relative weights?

“…Our search found relevant literature for these 11 countries: Australia [19], Canada [20][21][22][23], Denmark [1,2,24], Finland [25,26], France [27], Israel [28], New Zealand (NZ) [23,29], Norway [1,2,23,26], Sweden [1,2,23,26,30], The Netherlands [1,2,23,26], and The United Kingdom [2,23,26,31]; and also for the US state of Oregon [32].…”

“…For example, a study of drug reimbursement in Finland revealed that although administrators reported that "decisions are based on scientific data and that non-scientific arguments and considerations are not as important", it turned out in fact that budgetary impacts and drug prices were very important [25]; these considerations were described by the authors as "hidden non-scientific criteria behind the decisions" [26]. Similarly, a study of the decision-making process in France found that "despite the fact that cost considerations are at the very heart of the evaluation procedure, at no time are financial issues raised.…”

Public management and government performance: An international review

“…Among studies examining g-level dependent variables, most are concerned with stakeholder assessments of changes to government services and programs. Examples include the privatization of services (Poister andHenry 1994, Becker, Dluhy andTopinka 2001), citizen opinions on drugs chosen by the legislature for higher reimbursement in Finland (Vuorenkoski et al, 2003), and the effects of client influence in program decisions on their assessment of government programs in the U.K. (Bache 2001).…”