PNS36 A CONCEPTUAL PAPER ON THE USE OF PATIENT SUPPORT PROGRAMS IN PROVIDING BETTER ACCESS TO MEDICAL CARE IN EGYPT

Abstract

In Egypt access of the entire population to health care services and medications is still a challenging step, with high out of pocket expenditure that reaches 60%. A lot of medications and diagnostic services are still not publicly covered like biological, targeted therapies and many biomarkers tests, and although the government initiated a co-payment program, there is a still a gap in providing eligible patients with full course of therapy. Patient Support programs (PSP) can play a good role in providing better access to care, it can lessen the financial burden on patients or payers via compassionate affordability programs to sponsor medications that covers part of the treatment plan, it can fasten the treatment journey via providing free patient routing to diagnostic centers to help in diagnosis confirmation thus faster treatment decisions, it can aid in patient educations mainly in medication handling and administration, sometimes it can also help patients with logistics and documents needed to get their free medications from public sector thus faster access to treatment. another important aspect for PSP is to solve the reference countries pricing model, offering budget holders a compassionate program sponsoring part of the treatment instead of direct cut in the pubic price that may impact other countries that reference Egypt prices for listing thus encourage more pharma companies to early launch their medications in Egypt. As a conclusion, although some PSP are already launched in Egypt, most are sporadic pharmaceutical initiatives, it needs to be widely used and governmental regulations should be put to organize and monitor PSP so it can be used to fasten and widen access to medications. Also, PSP is a great tool for data generation that can be used as a patients registry for better informed decisions and risk sharing programs designs in the future.