Tackling reimbursement challenges to fair access to medicines - introduction to the topic

Abstract

Introduction: Ensuring both financial and physical access to medicines is a challenge for the reimbursement system. How countries are currently tackling this challenge is an issue worth exploring in this review paper.

Areas covered: The review covered three areas of studies such as pricing, reimbursement, and patient access measures. We compared the use and shortcomings of all measures influencing patients' access to medicines.

Expert opinion: In this work, we tried attempted to outline fair access policies toward reimbursed medicines in a historical manner by researching the measures accepted during different time periods by governments that affect patient access. From the review, it is evident that the countries are following similar models with a focus on pricing measures, reimbursement measures, and measures directly affecting the patients. It is our opinion that most of the measures are focused on ensuring the sustainability of the payer's funds and less are those that stimulate faster access. Even worse, we found that studies that are measuring the real patients access, and affordability are scarce.

Keywords: Patient access; health technology assessment; managed entry agreements; medicines; pricing; reference pricing; reimbursement.