Three patient support groups yesterday called on the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) to ensure transparency and traceability in new drug review procedures.
The Hope Foundation for Cancer Care, Taiwan Alliance of Patients’ Organizations and Taiwan Foundation for Rare Disorders held a news conference in Taipei yesterday morning to express their frustration with drug reviews.
A woman surnamed Chen (陳), who helped care for her mother who has had cancer since 2020, said the targeted therapy for treating her mother’s stage four lung cancer is not covered by National Health Insurance (NHI), so her family had spent nearly NT$6 million (US$190,992) out of pocket over the past four years.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
She said the targeted therapy was proposed for NHI coverage early last year, but almost two years have gone by and they still do not know if or when the administration would review it.
The average time for a new drug to pass an NHIA review is about 783 days, or 26.1 months, said Janice Chen (陳昭姿), Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center’s pharmacy department director, who has been involved in the administration’s drug review meetings for many years.
However, the NHIA had previously said the average time it took for a coverage review of new cancer drugs was about 411 days, or 13.7 months, the groups said.
New drugs had passed reviews faster when the NHI system was launched about 30 years ago, but now more limitations exist, making it difficult to predict when a new drug would pass a review, Janice Chen said.
The NHIA should make the process open and transparent, allowing doctors and patients to adjust their treatment strategies according to the expected progress, she said.
Regardless of whether a new drug eventually passes review, the process should be open, allowing patients to track a drug’s review progress so they can prepare mentally and make better decisions for their healthcare, Hope Foundation for Cancer Care CEO Elaine Su (蘇連瓔) said.
The groups said the Food and Drug Administration has clear regulations for the registration, testing and review of medicinal products, allowing people to know when review meetings are to be held, whether a company needs to provide additional information and when the review would be completed.
Hopefully, the NHIA’s review of new drugs for NHI coverage could have the same transparency and traceability, they said.
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