Medical council on drug programs

The Presidium of the Supreme Medical Council, after reviewing the draft ordinance of the President of the National Health Fund on the terms of concluding and implementing contracts such as hospital treatment in the field of drug programs, submits the following comments to the draft ordinance.

The requirements for service providers implementing drug programs , indicated in Annex 3 to the draft, may lead to the elimination of smaller centers, which, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and the transformation of large hospitals into temporary facilities, will result in disrupting the availability of treatment under drug programs. The experience to date shows that transforming large units into temporary hospitals in practice minimizes the availability of standard services. Therefore, in the opinion of the NRL Presidium, introducing legislative changes leading to the concentration of drug programs only around centers - which in practice are currently characterized by very limited accessibility to patients - significantly threatens the functioning of the health care system.

A solution that could partially meet the Project Initiator's assumptions, while securing access to services for patients, is to divide the program catalog into 2 parts - programs that actually contain rare diseases or require difficult-to-access diagnostics (e.g. rare diseases, genetic diseases, porphyria, advanced forms of cancer) and others that do not require them, e.g. Crohn's disease, UC or psoriasis, skin cancer, AS, MS or cystic fibrosis. If such a solution was applied, diagnostics and treatment of more common diseases could be carried out by smaller centers, but more accessible to patients, while rare diseases would be assigned to large centers.

At the same time, in the opinion of the Presidium of the NRL, the lump sums proposed by the Project Initiator for diagnostics in drug programs underestimate the valuation of many procedures, and the lump sums in some items do not even cover partial costs necessary to perform a full diagnosis in individual diseases. Doing so, coupled with limiting the availability of services, may prevent patients from undertaking treatment.

Source: NIL