Overview

Hungary and Poland are currently facing budgetary pressures to reduce health and pharmaceutical spending. However, they still must ensure that valuable innovative medicines are made available to patients. Risk-sharing schemes (RSSs) are a mechanism to achieve access, particularly for high-cost innovative medicines that payers might be reluctant to fund because of uncertainty around their cost-effectiveness in real life. RSSs can be designed to distribute financial risks, risks relating to health outcomes or a combination of both. Due to fiscal imperatives and complexities linked to the implementation of health outcome-based schemes, both countries have focused mainly on financial RSSs.