TIMOPHEI NIZHEGORODTSEV: OUR JOB IS TO MAKE PRICES IN RUSSIA NON-DISCRIMINATORY WITH REGARD TO THE REFERENCE COUNTRIES MARKETS
Head of FAS Department for Control over Social Sphere and Trade presented the regulator’s point of view on pricing and some other aspects of medicine circulation
On 14 May 2019, Head of FAS Department for Control over Social Sphere and Trade, Timophei Nizhegorodtsev took part in the 25th Russian Pharmaceutical Forum.
The speaker reported that the new medicine pricing rules came into effect on 1 January 2019.
“The meaning of adopting the rules is to exclude discrimination of Russian manufacturers against foreign manufacturers in terms of price registration and further related formalities, eliminate discrimination of Russian market for prices on foreign medicine against the prices for the same medicine in the reference countries markets, and third – support Russian manufacturers and the first manufacturers of generics”, stated Timophei Nizhegorodtsev.
“A significant part of this task is completed; the Government of the Russian Federation passed the relevant guidelines. Now we are expecting the next series of the story, after adopting the relevant legislation: verifying and reregistering prices for all medicine on the List of vital and essential medicine that are registered before 2019. We have already started registering medicine under the new method. The story with re-registration meets most resistance from foreign manufacturers. When we started verifying medicine pricing, we frequently found unreliable data in the course of registering vital and essential medicine. That is why we have changed prices for more than 1000 medicine, in some cases reduction was 10 times. In this sense it is clear that companies will face reduction of their customary budgets, which causes their resistance, because nobody want to share with the society – better share with their stockholders. Our job, however, as the authority and a regulator, is to make sure that prices in the Russian Federation become non-discriminatory with regard to the markets in the reference countries”, concluded Head of FAS Department for Control over Social Sphere and Trade.
Discussing performance of the informational-and-analytical system in procurement of medicine, Timophei Nizhegorodtsev reported: “Our big hope as a regulator is digitalization of all platforms related to the performance medicine markets. We believe that “Rostech” has done big work to create a relevant informational infrastructure, but obviously it is not necessary. Digitalization is such a powerful horse, the riders on which are catalogues and an adequate work on medicine registering. If these functions are not performed correctly, the horse can bring you anywhere, at high speed, but the goal”.
Speaking at the session “How the wholesale and retail segments will be developed in the coming years”, Timophei Nizhegorodtsev emphasized that the share of brand-generics will decrease consistently along with resolving the issues of medicine substitutability, reimbursements for medicines and medicine supplies.
He said: “Brand-generics are a market of underdeveloped market, which is in some kind of a chaos. The bigger the chaos, the higher is the brand importance, because consumer reacts to the brand under the conditions of uncertainty. With improving order – regulatory and informational, with increased standardization, the importance of brand-generics began reducing. In this case, the future is in private labels”.
“We are all standing up for developing value-based procurement, but we must be certain at every stage that we are not mistaken in registering effects and in due actions of the processes participants. To this end we should do enormous work – infrastructural, educational, supervisory, priori to which we must complete “tuning” of the existing models, we need to free the funds that we spend today on brand-generics to procure genuinely innovative medicine, we need to free capacities This way we can reduce prices and create opportunities for competition. If we achieve it, executing all our tasks, preconditions will emerge for a serious discussion of the next step in developing medicine provision”, declared Timophei Nizhegorodtsev at the session on a “Transition to the value-based health care model: risks and opportunities for pharmaceutical companies”.