Greece on the map of countries with fast access to pharmaceutical innovation –
The opportunity to include Greece on the map of countries with very quick access to
pharmaceutical innovation highlighted by its Market Access & External Relations Director AbbVie, Ms. Penny Retsa, from the floor of the Panhellenic Conference on Health Economics and Policies, on Wednesday, December 14, 2022, highlighting the important role that the Hellenic Health Technology Assessment Committee can play and the implementation of the new new Regulation, in our country.
Pharmaceutical innovation
In her deposition, Ms. Retsa underlined the value of pharmaceuticals in quotations
innovation, as “the synchronisers of our science lead in many cases of serious diseases to a significant improvement in life expectancy, to a better quality of life and mental health, while more and more patients achieve cure, so that they can live a normal white disease life”.
Afterwards, Ms. Retsa highlighted the fact that patients in our country do not have that much
quick access to pharmaceutical innovation as patients in other European
Countries. Describing, in fact, the time-consuming process from the approval of a drug
from the EMA, to his compensation in our country, he said that “unfortunately, we are far from
still far from the best European practices, as well as in Germany a new drug
is compensated in an average of 133 days, while in Greece it takes an average of 498 days”, which unfortunately happens “despite the very valuable and honorable efforts of both the HTA Committee and the Negotiation Committee”.
On the different speed of access to innovative medicines in the Member States
of the Union, Ms. Penny Retsa reported that similar methods occur in the different national or regional processes and methodologies in the Health Technology Assessment Committees, across Europe and that “the HTA Committees in the Member States are forced to do all their work and the corresponding assessments,
wasting significant human and financial resources while managing
a huge workload every day.”
European Regulation of Health Technology Assessment
He attached particular importance to the new European Health Technology Assessment Regulation, which is a unique opportunity to create a single framework of rules and a single process for everyone, noting that it is very important to “embrace the new institutional framework” and “adapt to the new data . , in order to accelerate patients’ access to pharmaceutical innovation”.
Market Access & External Relations Director of AbbVie, emphasized that “the challenge before us is to strengthen the multifaceted work of the HTA Committee by removing part of its heavy workload, to avoid doing double work at the national and high level” and that “through a single, efficient and reliable framework we can turn the implementation of the new request for the operation of the Health Technology Assessment Committee into a mechanism for accelerating patient access to pharmaceutical innovation”.
Ms. Retsa emphasized, in fact, that “our country can be a model for the best
adoption of the new Regulation for HTA”, which “will also allow the abolition of the 5/11 external criteria for submitting a file to the national HTA committee”.
In this way, “Greece will enter the map of the countries with the rapid access of
patients in pharmaceutical innovation, as with the abolition of the external criteria there will be an acceleration by about 12 months (!) of the process for the official reimbursement of a medicine in our country”.
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