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The European Joint Clinical Assessment (JCA) is due to come into force from 2025, assessing all eligible health technologies in a phased approach starting, with cancer therapies and ATMPs. We wanted to understand the perception of the introduction of the JCA among payers across European healthcare systems.

Member states represented within this research were chosen and grouped based on their purchasing power and population size. These include; France, Germany, Italy and Spain (EU4), along with Belgium, Poland, Hungry and Portugal.

We used the Lightning Insights platform to survey the sample of national payers to understand; the perceived impact of the implementation of the EU-JCA for patient access to medicines at the member state level and the associated implications for manufacturers.

Our research found that the introduction of the EU-JCA will likely have the greatest practical impact in member states with less resources for HTA, resulting in a beneficial impact on patient access to medicines

Among the EU4, and member states with higher purchasing powers, payer representatives consider the EU-JCA will provide less additional value than in the existing national assessment processes. It was noted that unless parallel initiatives to centralise economic value assessment and pricing negotiations are introduced, variability in patient access and reimbursement restrictions are predicted to continue due to financial disparities between healthcare systems.

Despite the potential for progress towards accelerating patient access and reducing variation, member state level responsibility for the negotiation of pricing and reimbursement is likely to mean continued divergence between member states depending on purchasing power. Furthermore, postlaunch requirements for additional data generation to inform country level re-evaluation could also lead to divergent requests (and growing administrative complexity for manufacturers) to meet national level conditions for reimbursement.

To learn more about the implications of the EU-JCA and the impact it will have on the introduction of health technologies, contact our expert team.

Article published 7 November 2021.