Thank you for the question.
In yesterday's announcement, the focus was on increasing access to medicines for rare diseases. As you saw, about 90% of the funding will be transferred to the provinces and territories to enhance their coverage.
In addition to providing easier access to medications, we want to make sure that the different agencies making decisions about medications work together to ensure that patients have timely access to them.
That includes the regulatory arm of Health Canada, which is responsible for what we call the agile regulations project that launched this past December. This will make it easier once drugs get authorized, even when we have little data on them. These are medications for small groups of patients. This method will make it possible to get these medications authorized and then gather data on their safety and effectiveness.
It also includes working with the agency that assesses health technologies, to help the provinces and territories get drug coverage information. Parallel studies are currently underway at the regulatory and health technology agencies. The goal is to ensure that processes are not sequential, but that they run parallel, reducing the time it takes for patients to access medications.
Another key factor is provinces negotiating drug prices with manufacturers.
One of the goals is to ensure that various decision-makers can expedite the efficiency of their processes.