Allocating sufficient budgets for the new drugs has been Pharmaceutical Committee's main focuses for years. Compared with neighbouring countries Japan and South Korea, which both have national healthcare insurance schemes, Taiwan's reimbursement processes is much slower, which averages 400 days for the reimbursement of general medicine and almost 800 days for oncology medicines. The key reason for these serious delays is an insufficient budget for new drugs under the global budget framework.

The industry has learned that the NHIA uses a "Replacement Model" to determine the new drug budget. Under this model, new drugs are categorised into "Breakthrough", "2A" and "2B" categories. Once approved for reimbursement, the NHIA will track the sales of these new drugs and, based on this, plan the new drug budget for the following year. However, there are many uncertainties in these parameters, which leads to unsustainable new drug budget projections, as a consequence, the approval of reimbursement for new medicines is obstructed or delayed, giving patients no access to new drugs. The guest of honor, Dr. Chen Rui-Ying, will give a speech on topic "New drug budget's impact on new drug access" to share her valuable insights with committee members.

Ms. Chen Rui-Ying has been Counselor of the Taiwan Hospital Association (THA) as well as a number of posts in academia and associations she holds, including executive secretary of THA health insurance committee and DRG working group. She served also as Special Assistant to Superintendent of National Taiwan University Hospital, Director of Execution Committee from Taiwan College of Healthcare Executives, Delegate of Pharmaceutical Benefit and Reimbursement Scheme Joint committee (PBRS) and Consultant of Taiwan Medical Association.

Contact: HUANG Yu-Lun / Tel 2740-0236 ext. 228 / Huang.yulun@ecct.com.tw