The 2nd Annual “Right to Health” Congress was held in Moscow at the “Digital Business Space” platform, aimed to highlight the prospects of the domestic healthcare industry, which have become more acute in modern geopolitical conditions, in a wide format.

The growth in the cost of drug manufacturing has a particularly acute effect on the assortment availability of pharmaceutical products included in the list of vital and essential drugs (VED). The Association of Russian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers has repeatedly appealed to the regulators, pointing out a significant increase in the cost of pharmaceutical substances, auxiliary raw materials and packaging materials for the industry, entailing a decrease in the profitability of the production of these drugs, and, as a result, the risks of their exit from the market, and putting forward a proposal on the need for a one-time indexation of maximum selling prices for medicines of the low price segment from the Vital and Essential Drugs List.

Once again, Viсtor Dmitriev, Chairman of the Public Council under the Federal Service for Surveillance in Healthcare (Roszdravnadzor), drew the attention of the audience to this problem. As a speaker of the session on the reimbursement system as an effective approach to managing the provision of citizens with medicines, he recalled that there had already been several attempts to “approach the apparatus called drug reimbursement”, but each time there were external factors hindering the implementation of this project. And at this stage there are also obstacles hindering its launch. In particular, these are various KPIs of departments supervising drug circulation, which leads to inconsistency in decisions made and negatively affects the assortment availability of medicines. “Without the availability of drugs on the market, any model of drug provision will be ineffective. The current policy of the FAS, which is striving to make Russia the country with the cheapest medicines, regardless of macroeconomic and sanctions realities, leads to the exit of dozens of drugs from the market. One must admit one’s mistakes and correct them promptly!” — he called.

The congress also discussed the development of domestic scientific potential, the effectiveness of the existing organizational and legal forms of healthcare management, the viability of the existing CHI system, the possibility of self-sufficient provision of drugs for a wide range of nomenclature. The experts exchanged their accumulated experience and effective practices, tried together to find universal mechanisms that would reduce the level of morbidity and mortality in the framework of socially significant nosologies.