The Ukrainian Health Ministry will form state policy in the healthcare sphere and will not engage in lobbying pharmaceutical manufacturers, Deputy Health Minister Roman Ilyk has said.

"It is important that the Health Ministry takes care of creating the state policy. It gets rid of the practice of procurement and the distribution of financial flows that went through it. The Health Ministry must form the rules on which the state policy works," he said at a briefing in Kyiv on Thursday, October 19.

While commenting on the role of pharmaceutical manufacturers in the implementation of medical reform, Ilyk noted that the guaranteed amount of medical services envisaged by health reform also included its medicinal provision.

"Along with guaranteed medical services, there's a guaranteed package with regard to providing access to medicines. Here there's no lobbying of a specific pharmaceutical manufacturer, a specific pharmaceutical company or a specific name. There's an INN (international nonproprietary name), there's a form of production, and there's a dosage," he said.

Ilyk recalled that in the sphere of outpatient medical care the state was implementing and would expand the reimbursement program (the reimbursement of the cost of medicines), which currently includes three nosologies.

In the hospital segment, according to him, the state policy will be oriented towards providing medical facilities with medicines in accordance with the national list, which includes INNs, rather than the trade names of drugs defined by protocols and treatment standards.

Ilyk said that INNs, forms of production and dosage would be the main parameters that will be laid in the basis of the updated system of budget purchases of medicines, which the Health Ministry is developing on the ProZorro electronic platform.

According to him, the ministry is working on the introduction of an electronic prescription and the eHealth system in Ukraine.

As reported, on October 19, the Verkhovna Rada supported at second reading and as a whole the bill on state financial guarantees for the provision of medical services and medicines (No. 6327), which launches medical reform.

According to Anatoliy Reder, director general of the Odesa-based pharmaceutical company InterChem, medical reform and changes in the healthcare system should envisage a balanced pharmaceutical policy.