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Medicines in health systems working toward universal health coverage

Medicines are central to achieving the health care access, equity, quality, and risk protection goals of universal health coverage (UHC). Wise medicines management and sound policies are also crucial for the financial sustainability of UHC schemes. Countries and schemes pursuing UHC are at different stages of developing and implementing targeted medicines management and policy approaches. Stakeholders can benefit from and are interested in sharing strategies, tools, and experiences.

This thematic series in Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice contains a set of papers on country experiences and overarching issues related to medicines in health systems in Asian countries on the path to universal health coverage.

Read more on a blog post by Maryam Bigdeli.

Collection published: 23 February 2015
Last updated: 25 April 2015

  1. Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) has encouraged physicians to use “chronic medication prescriptions” for patients with stable chronic diseases since 1995. Patients are allowed to refill such prescripti...

    Authors: Jason C Hsu, Dennis Ross-Degnan, Anita K Wagner, Ching-Lan Cheng, Yea-Huei Kao Yang, Fang Zhang and Christine Y Lu
    Citation: Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice 2015 8:15
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. The Brazilian constitution guarantees the right to health, including access to medicines. In May 2004, Brazil’s government announced the “Farmácia Popular” Program (FPP) as a new mechanism to improve the Brazilia...

    Authors: Isabel Cristina Martins Emmerick, José Miguel do Nascimento Jr, Marco Aurélio Pereira, Vera Lucia Luiza and Dennis Ross-Degnan
    Citation: Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice 2015 8:10
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  4. New antidiabetic medications such as insulin analogues and thiazolidinediones have been introduced over the last decade. This study compares the uptake of new agents in three emerging pharmaceutical markets: B...

    Authors: Christine Y Lu, Isabel Cristina M Emmerick, Peter Stephens, Dennis Ross-Degnan and Anita K Wagner
    Citation: Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice 2015 8:7
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. Patient access (or risk-sharing) schemes are alternative market access agreements between healthcare payers and medical product manufacturers for conditional coverage of promising health technologies. This stu...

    Authors: Christine Y Lu, Caitlin Lupton, Shana Rakowsky, Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar, Dennis Ross-Degnan and Anita K Wagner
    Citation: Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice 2015 8:6
    Content type: Research article Published on: