Establishing an efficient and sustainable healthcare system is important, balancing high quality care and improvements in the health of the population with efficiency of services while not overburdening national budgets. Uptake of new, innovative pharmaceuticals has been associated with long-term improvements in health outcomes, better quality of life, and benefits for the healthcare system.

Headroom for innovation can be achieved through improving policies for generic pharmaceuticals and investing the resulting resources where need is significant, such as new and potentially innovative pharmaceutical products. Generating healthcare savings and subsequently re-allocating these savings to reward and encourage innovation and promote the use of novel, innovative pharmaceuticals can be an essential part of establishing and maintaining an efficient and sustainable healthcare system.

Objectives

This study considers the potential for creating headroom for innovation in the healthcare systems of Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), in both of which difficulties in patient access to and delays in the market entry of innovative medicines have been observed.

The specific objectives of the study were as follows:

• To identify gaps and issues in current generic and biosimilar policies in Egypt and KSA based on best practices from other countries.
• To propose how to improve generic and biosimilar uptake and suggest potential policy reform to reducing inefficient healthcare spending on these products.
• To quantify the potential savings associated with optimised spending on generics and biosimilars.
• To provide recommendations on how to create headroom for innovation by freeing up resources through generic and biosimilar policy change and how to redirect savings to reward innovation using examples of practices from other countries.