Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13175

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Publication type: Journal Article

Dhalla I, Laupacis A.
Moving from opacity to transparency in pharmaceutical policy
CMAJ 2008 Feb 12; 178:(4):428-31
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/178/4/428

Abstract:

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 this commentary in response to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health’s 2007 parliamentary review of the Common Drug Review program. Established in 2002 by the federal government, the Common Drug Review was charged with evaluating the cost-effectiveness of new outpatient drugs and to make recommendations to Canada’s publicly funded drug plans.1,2 Although many submissions to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health legitimately criticized the Common Drug Review’s lack of transparency, we believe that the scope of both the criticism and the review itself was too narrow. We suggest that, from start to finish, the drug evaluation systems in Canada and elsewhere lack transparency…

Notes:

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