The Ministry of Health and Welfare on Aug. 13 held the inaugural “U.K.-Taiwan Health technology assessment (HTA) workshop”, gathering scholars from England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which focused on leveraging clinical study of real-world data for emerging technologies such as gene therapy and cellular therapy.

National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) Director General Shih Chung-liang said that with the rapid development of new medical technologies, various countries have begun expediting the approval of new drugs based to address unmet medical needs. However, for many new drugs, there remains a lack of data on long-term survival rates, which makes the efficacy and financial impacts of their inclusion on the National Health Insurance (NHI) fee schedule highly uncertain. Therefore, it is vital to explore the best practices on collecting and assessing real-world data to enable coverage of expensive new drugs.

NHIA Senior Executive Officer Dai Hsueh-yong said that while both the U.K. and Taiwan have adopted HTA for emerging therapeutics including gene therapy and cellular therapy, the number of patients with rare disorders and cancers are relatively few and can benefit from data sharing between the U.K. and Taiwan to achieve faster review times for inclusion on the NHI fee schedule. For drugs that are being conditionally reimbursed, if they are found to be ineffective through real-world data assessment, they will no longer be reimbursed by the NHI.

[2023-9-13/United Daily News]