Danish Medicines Council

The Danish Medicines Council’s role is to provide guidance about new medicines for use in the Danish hospital sector. The Danish Medicines Council does this through two separate processes: assessments of new medicine, where a new compound is compared to the standard therapy used in Denmark and guidelines, where several medicines for a specified disease are compared. The guideline process results in a recommendation with a prioritized list of medicines to be used for patients with the specified disease.

The Danish Medicines Council was established on January 1, 2017, by the board of Danish Regions. The Council is based on experiences from previous initiatives such as RADS and KRIS.

The Danish Medicines Council is to:

• Ensure fast use of new medicines across hospitals.
• Ensure that new medicines to be used in hospitals has been proven to be effective for patients.
• Ensure homogeneous use of new and existing medicines across hospitals and regions.
• Impose stringent requirements for documentation of the effectiveness of medicines during the assessment process. This will ultimately benefit patients as it ensures that medicines used in the hospital sector has been proven to be beneficial for the patients.
• Improve the foundation for negotiations for Danish Regions, when entering price negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies, for both the new medicines the guidelines process.