New Drug Reimbursement and Pricing Policy in Taiwan.

BACKGROUND: Taiwan has implemented a national health insurance system for more than 20 years now. The benefits of pharmaceutical products and new drug reimbursement scheme are determined by the Expert Advisory Meeting and the Pharmaceutical Benefit and Reimbursement Scheme (PBRS) Joint Committee in Taiwan. OBJECTIVES: To depict the pharmaceutical benefits and reimbursement scheme for new drugs and the role of health technology assessment (HTA) in drug policy in Taiwan. METHODS: All data were collected from the Expert Advisory Meeting and the PBRS meeting minutes; new drug applications with HTA reports were derived from the National Health Insurance Administration Web site. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the timeline of a new drug from application submission to reimbursement effective, the distribution of approved price, and the approval rate for a new drug with/without local pharmacoeconomic study. RESULTS: After the second-generation national health insurance system, the timeline for a new drug from submission to reimbursement effective averages at 436 days, and that for an oncology drug reaches an average of 742 days. New drug approval rate is 67% and the effective rate (through the approval of the PBRS Joint Committee and the acceptance of the manufacturer) is 53%. The final approved price is 53.6% of the international median price and 70% of the proposed price by the manufacturer. Out of 95 HTA reports released during the period January 2011 to February 2017, 28 applications (30%) conducted an HTA with a local pharmacoeconomic study, and all (100%) received reimbursement approval. For the remaining 67 applications (70%) for which HTA was conducted without a local pharmacoeconomic analysis, 54 cases (81%) were reimbursed. CONCLUSIONS: New drug applications with local pharmacoeconomic studies are more likely to get reimbursement.

Outpatient drug expenditures and prescription policies for diseases with high cost to the National Health Insurance system in Taiwan.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The high cost of drugs, particularly those used to treat upper respiratory tract infections, is an increasingly important problem for the National Health Insurance system in Taiwan. This study proposed a new classification scheme for reimbursing drug cost and estimated its impact on expenditures and health care utilization. METHODS: Data were obtained from the National Health Research Institutes' year 2000 computer file of the National Health Insurance Academic Research Database in Taiwan. Two factors were used to classify medications: 1) urgency of medications required; and 2) patient's self-care ability. RESULTS: Among the 10 diseases with the highest number of outpatient department (OPD) visits, 7 were upper respiratory diseases. Acute upper respiratory infections (URIs) and acute nasopharyngitis were the 2 diseases with the highest number of OPD visits. Drug expenditure for acute URIs is about 6% of total expenditure for drugs. Medications suitable for URIs patients' self-care accounted for 42.8% of the total cost of prescribed drugs for these illnesses, and treatment medications unsuitable for patients' self-care accounted for 48.6%. Other medications used for URIs could not be grouped into these categories. The total expenditure for acute nasopharyngitis was about 1.3% of total expenditure for drugs. Medications suitable for self-care in patients with nasopharyngitis accounted for 51.8% of the total cost of medication prescribed for this illness, and medications unsuitable for patients' self-care accounted for 36.8%. CONCLUSIONS: Reducing the medications suitable for patients' self-care and enforcing different levels of payment rates on medications unsuitable for patients' self-care may reduce the excessive use of OPD drugs, improve the appropriateness of utilization for acute URIs and the common cold, and allow medical resources to be distributed more efficiently.