Hong Kong public hospitals to streamline steps for approving drugs, giving patients faster access to new medications
- Hospital Authority will require companies to submit applications directly without going through doctors, which may shorten time to five months, official says
- It usually takes up to 10 months for a new drug to be introduced into Hospital Authority formulary, he says
The Hospital Authority would require companies to submit applications directly to it without going through doctors, which could shorten the time to five months, director of cluster services Dr Simon Tang Yiu-hang said.
Tang said he expected the streamlining to be completed in half a year.
He said pharmaceutical companies were currently required to ask doctors to write up application documents. The application would then be submitted to various committees at public hospitals for review before reaching the authority’s head office.
It usually took up to 10 months for a new drug to be introduced into the formulary, he said.
“We do not think there is a need for that. In fact, pharmaceutical companies employ a number of pharmacists. They are capable of directly submitting an application and a large amount of data to us,” he said on Friday.