The Pharmaceutical Pricing and Reimbursement Information (PPRI) initiative—Experiences from engaging with pharmaceutical policy makers

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

“…Like in other EU member states, Polish patients rarely cover the full price of prescription medicines out of pocket; instead, they usually pay nothing or a share of the price, with the rest being covered by a state subsidy (Vogler et al 2008). Unlike the approval of new medicines, practically transferred to the EU level, drug reimbursement has been almost entirely left up to national authorities, with the EU setting out only generic borderline requirements for the policy process in its Transparency Directive.…”

Stakeholder preferences about policy objectives and measures of pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement

“…We conducted a search of several databases (MedLine, Embase, Econlit, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Publications, Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care Group, WHO, National Health Services Economic Evaluation Database) to retrieve publications (in all EU languages) on pharmaceutical policies in all EU Member States (including Croatia) and EFTA countries published between 1995 and February 2013. Additionally, we searched grey literature via GoogleScholar, did a hand search of selected bibliographies and performed a Pharmaceutical Pricing and Reimbursement Information (PPRI) network query [29]. The literature review (cf.…”

“…However, discussions about the future pricing policies have been on-going among policy-makers of European countries for some time (e.g. the CAPR network maintained by the European Commission, with policy reports [22,24,34] done by the EMINet consortium supporting this network, and the PPRI network [29]). This indicates an interest in alternative pricing policies and, possibly, a need for change.…”

“…The methodological approach is, however, an issue because EPR is not the simple technical tool as it is often called [37]. Getting access to comparable price data and interpreting them appropriately is a challenge; recent networking and cooperation initiatives, including the European medicine price database Euripid, have helped to build the capacity of authorities and payers [19,29]. But EPR' s capacity to contain costs is limited since referencing is done to the officially published 'list prices' in other countries, which are not the actual discounted prices [16,19,33,34].…”

Generic substitution, financial interests, and imperfect agency

“…Thereafter, insurers are obliged to reimburse each price that is set by generic producers. By way of contrast, many European countries install reimbursement ceilings that are oriented towards the cheapest prices that are offered in the market (internal reference pricing, Vogler et al (2008)). If the price exceeds the ceiling, the difference needs to be paid by the insured, which is avoided by most generic producers.…”