Updates

Each province and territory manages their own public drug plans, and so drug formularies vary across the country.  The creation of the Canadian Guidelines for Economic Evaluation of Pharmaceuticals (1994) and the Common Drug Review (2003) aimed to harmonize and standardize drug assessment in Canada, and to ensure that publicly reimbursed drugs were cost-effective. Although all public drug plans aside from Quebec require that drugs are assessed by the Common Drug Review or pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review before being considered for reimbursement, the non-binding nature of these recommendations means there is some variation in which drugs are publicly reimbursed across the nation. Furthermore, the shift in pharmaceutical research and development from common to rarer diseases makes the generation of sufficient clinical evidence of effectiveness more difficult, making current efforts to develop and refine specific processes to evaluate drugs for rare diseases particularly urgent.