Access to innovative therapies: It's bad, but it hasn't been this good before

Over the past year, access to innovative therapies and diagnostic solutions in Poland has increased by 5 points and stands at 58 points out of 100 on the KPI scale, according to the latest data collected by the Access GAP platform, which presents data on the Visegrad Group countries. The Czech Republic remains the leader, followed by Slovakia, with Poland in third place, slightly ahead of Hungary. The Association of Employers of Innovative Pharmaceutical Companies INFARMA presented the report, which consists of a comparison of the Visegrad Group countries and the Polish Refund Radar, on Wednesday.

The data is clear: access to innovative drugs and diagnostic solutions is improving in all Visegrad countries, and in Poland it has improved by 16 points over three years. In the first edition, presented in 2022 (data for 2021), the overall Access GAP index for Poland was 42 points, the lowest of all countries. A year later, the index was 11 points better, and is now another 5 points higher.

In this year's ranking, Poland received an overall score of 58 points on the 100-point KPI scale. The Czech Republic remains the leader (69 points), with the highest score in any edition to date, followed by Slovakia with 61 points. The lowest score was achieved by Hungary (56 points), which nevertheless made the most progress over the past year of months.

As the authors of the report pointed out, what works to the disadvantage of all the V4 countries is, first and foremost, the restrictions on the approval of a given drug for reimbursement and the time that elapses between the registration of a drug and its reimbursement. Today, in the Visegrad countries, patients wait on average as long as 1,029 days for a new drug that saves their health and often their lives. This time, clearly longer than in the countries of the "old" EU, at the same time also varies: in the Czech Republic patients wait on average 2.2 years, and in Poland as much as a year longer (3.2 years).

According to this year's Access GAP report, Poland improved its score in all three areas:

- In oncology (from 61 to 67 points),

- In rare diseases (from 57 to 64 points)

- In chronic diseases (41 to 43 points).

In terms of specific diseases, the biggest improvements relative to 2023 are seen in cystic fibrosis, breast cancer and prostate cancer.

- Poland has improved its score against the Visegrad countries in terms of access to innovative therapies, but we are still ahead of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and only Hungary has a worse score than us. The question then arises, is the pace of these changes sufficient? Especially if we analyze the barriers that remain unchanged, i.e. the time it takes from registration to reimbursement, access for narrow groups of patients, and administrative barriers in the form of the sometimes protracted process of contracting drug programs, which we see particularly clearly this year in the case of cystic fibrosis. The reimbursement decision for new drugs was already made in the first half of 2022, but it is only this year that we see a clear improvement in access to treatment," stressed Michal Byliniak, CEO of the Association of Innovative Pharmaceutical Companies INFARMA.

During the presentation of the report, it was pointed out that the area of population-based, chronic diseases is clearly "behind" in reimbursement decisions. The most difficult situation is currently in the area of diabetes (an increase from 31.8 points to 34.3 points) and Parkinson's disease, where there has been no change over the past year (23 points in 2023 and 2024).

- Improving access to innovative drugs for Polish patients shows that oncology and rare diseases are being treated as priority areas by the public payer. And while these were undoubtedly needed decisions, as the gaps in these areas were worryingly large, we must not forget about chronic diseases, which, due to the aging of the population, will be an increasing challenge for the health care system in Poland and the European Union as a whole. What's more, chronic diseases are also increasingly affecting young people, so we are dealing with increasingly large patient populations also active," reminds Agnieszka Grzybowska-Zalewska, president of the Board of the Association of Employers of Innovative Pharmaceutical Companies INFARMA.