Aligned reviews for certain drugs

The Health Canada and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) review processes are independent of each other. This project will make sure that the timing of Health Canada and Canadian HTA reviews are better aligned, while facilitating information sharing between Health Canada and HTA organizations.

Examples of Canadian organizations that do HTAs include the:

• Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH)
• Institut national d'excellence en santé et en services sociaux (INESSS)

The goal for this project is to cut the time between Health Canada's market approval and HTA funding recommendations to federal, provincial and territorial drug plans and cancer organizations, while also improving communication between the HTA organizations and Health Canada.  This has the potential to speed up access for patients to drugs.

The tasks for this project include:

• a pilot with CADTH for oncology drugs (completed December 2017)
• publishing a Notice to Industry on the process for aligned review of products (completed June 2018)
• developing an Implementation Plan (completed June 2018)

All parts of this project are now fully implemented, and we continue to collect best practices to improve project processes.