Bratislava, September 17, 2021 - The process of medicines assessment in Slovakia has significant cracks, and the main reason for the emerging risks is the fact that it was not optimally set at the beginning. Experts should use pharmaco-economic models to assess the cost-effectiveness of medicinal products, which means that they will assess whether the benefits of the medicines are worth the money spent. However, in the audited period from 2017 to 2020, they looked at cost-effectiveness only for 35 medicinal products out of the total number of 479 evaluated medicinal products, which represents only 7 %.

The analytical team of the Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic recommends that the Ministry of Health take measures to require a financial-cost of medicines assessment based on international methodological recommendations following the example of other EU countries. Failure to use these procedures increases the risk of subjective and incorrect evaluation, reduces the transparency of the process of categorization of medicines, which may contribute to the inefficient spending of funds on medicines from public health insurance.

The full text of the press release about this issue in Slovak language is available here. Use the Google icon in the top bar for automatic translation.