The Canadian Medicine Marketplace
Module Overview
An important part of understanding and explaining the price of pharmaceuticals is having a strong understanding of the often complex Canadian marketplace for medicines. This module explains how the Canadian healthcare and medicines marketplace is structured to ensure medication prices and costs are reasonable.
This will be achieved through the following sections:
- How the Canadian medicines marketplace has developed
- Who pays for medicines in Canada?
- Evolution of pharmaceutical intellectual property system in Canada and its impact on the marketplace
- Case Study: The physical monument to Canada’s pharma IP regime
- The Patented Medicine Prices Review Board
- Evolution of Canada’s health technology assessment (HTA) system
- How HTA recommendations are determined and control prices
- The pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA)
- Roles of healthcare professionals in the medicines marketplace
- Generic drug use and prices in Canada
- Alternative access for Canadians to innovative treatments
- Treatments for rare diseases and proposals for universal drug coverage
Module Objectives
The objectives of this module are to explain how the Canadian healthcare and medicines marketplace is structured to ensure medication prices and costs are reasonable, including key differences between Canada and the United States and how reimbursement decisions regarding medicines in Canada are made.
Following completion of this module, you will be able to:
- Discuss how the Canadian medicines marketplace developed over time
- Explain how the pharmaceutical intellectual property system has influenced the pharmaceutical marketplace
- Describe how the federal government controls pharmaceutical prices in Canada
- Discuss how the health technology assessment has evolved and influences pharmaceutical prices in Canada
- Discuss generic drug prices in Canada and calls for universal drug coverage