Transparency and open communication are key to a healthy relationship edical practice these days is influenced to a large extent by clinical practice guidelines. Usually sponsored by professional bodies, these compendia of advice should be produced by groups of experts with broad representation and credibility. These experts are expected to follow clearly defined processes 1 to arrive at recomm...

© 2008 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors 428 Physicians and patients should demand, and participants in the system should provide, transparency in all of the areas of drug approval and reimbursement (Table 1). The current situation, in which the evidence used to make decisions often remains secret and the decisions are not adequately explained to the public, is untenable. We wrote t...

BACKGROUND Affordable, accessible, and innovation-promoting pharmaceutical care is essential to the operation of a sustainable health system. External reference pricing (ERP), a common pharmaceutical policy in Europe, suffers today from indigenous weaknesses that may cause market distortions and barriers to care, burdening mostly the weak economies, and hence, raising ethical and political worr...

Retail sales of prescription drugs totaled $154.5 billion in 2001. The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates annual sales will exceed $400 billion by the year 2010. This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of two policy families that could be used to cope with high and rising pharmaceutical costs. We employ a general-equilibrium approach to contrast the curre...

POM medicines are primarily only available to the public when prescribed by a medical practitioner, although historically dentists have long been able to supply from a limited Dental Formulary. More recently in the UK, full prescribing rights have also been accorded to other health care professionals such as nurses and pharmacists, as long as certain specified conditions are met. P medicines ca...

Despite increasing recalls, contamination events, and shortages, drug companies continue to rely on outdated manufacturing plants and processes. Drug manufacturing’s inefficiency and lack of innovation stand in stark contrast to drug discovery, which is the focus of a calibrated innovation policy that combines patents and FDA regulation. Pharmaceutical manufacturing lags far behind the innovati...

Most countries are using some kinds of pharmaceutical policies, like external reference-based pricing, to control the costs of medicines. This policy could be implemented in different ways and there is no systematic method for selecting reference countries. In this study, we tried to identify and classify the factors affecting the selection of reference countries in Iran. Delphi method was empl...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to give a review of the complex system of budgetary constraints to which the French health-care system has been committed since 1996 and to evaluate the consequences on drug policy and on efficient use of pharmaceuticals. METHODS Literature review, legal texts analysis, and interviews with policy makers and companies managers were performed. RESU...

Background: To manage public expenditures in the mid-1990s, British Columbia implemented evidence-based drug coverage policies, including " reference pricing. " Industry lobbied against the province' s policy, arguing that reference pricing harms patients and that it is inconsistent with federal and provincial legislation. Researchers and the courts have studied and rejected industry' s claims....

This paper analyzes the changing R&D process at Japanese pharmaceutical companies, based on a questionnaire survey as well as structured interviews at large Japanese pharmaceutical companies. Japanese pharmaceutical companies have recently engaged in active R&D collaborations with other firms as well as universities. This paper identifies the factors underlying this trend, finding that all thre...