Roadmap for a Transformation
October 19, 2026
Canadian healthcare leaders share their perspectives on key recommendations from the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force Report
At the core of the report by the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force are 39 recommendations touching on everything from regulatory review frameworks to clinical trials to support for home-grown biotechnology companies.3 Here, we’ve asked the experts for their perspectives on select recommendations that could prove transformational for patients and health system stakeholders alike.
TOPIC:
Innovation and assessment of value – Canada’s HTA process
Recommendation #8: Redefine value frameworks
This recommendation calls on Canada’s Drug Agency (CDA-AMC) to evolve its HTA methodologies, by working collaboratively with the pCPA and pharmaceutical manufacturers to define new standards and practices. As one element of that evolution, the Task Force recommends that CDA-AMC continue its efforts to conduct its reviews in parallel with Health Canada’s and pCPA’s pathways. This is already well underway: the report notes that over 80% of oncology products and over 70% of non-oncology products undergo concurrent review.3
The expert perspective:
Catherine Beauchemin
Partner, PeriPharm
I think the recommendation about concurrent, coordinated reviews is essential. If all Canadian stakeholders truly are committed to accelerating access to innovative therapies, we need to coordinate and collaborate with each other, so we can streamline processes and ultimately shorten the time to patient access.
CDA-AMC has a pilot program that incorporates a broader societal perspective into pharmacoeconomic evaluations, but it’s mainly used for certain complex submissions. In Québec, the Institut national d'excellence en santé et services sociaux (INESSS) has taken a broader view, requiring that all pharmacoeconomic analyses, not just the complex ones, consider both the societal impact and the public health/social services perspective. It would be helpful if CDA-AMC could apply that type of societal perspective to all reviews. And to further strengthen transparency, CDA-AMC’s reports should more explicitly describe how patient and caregiver perspectives informed their assessment and recommendation.
When it comes to evolving the practices at CDA-AMC and INESSS, we can look to innovations at HTA bodies in other countries. Some have started tailoring their economic evaluation approaches to specific therapeutic areas such as rare and ultra-rare diseases; it would be great if CDA-AMC and INESSS could follow suit. Some agencies are also using emerging methodologies like severity weighting of quality-adjusted life-years – a metric that CDA-AMC has recently started exploring. Such novel approaches would help ensure that Canada remains at the forefront of HTA methodological innovation.
TOPIC:
Innovation and assessment of value – the pCPA
Recommendation #10: Role and mandate of the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA)
This recommendation suggests that the pCPA should also incorporate broader societal perspectives into its negotiations, set ambitious standards for reducing the time to listing a new drug, and conduct its processes in parallel with other agencies’ reviews. It sets some specific and ambitious timing targets: it says the pCPA should work with provinces and territories to streamline the process around issuing a Letter of Engagement (LOE) and signing a Letter of Intent (LOI), with a target of achieving the final listing agreement in a timely manner (e.g., within 30 to 60 days) following the LOI. Again, things are starting to move in the right direction – with the pCPA Temporary Access Process (pTAP) and Early Negotiation Process (ENP), some negotiations now happen concurrently with other levels of review, with timelines getting shorter. But there’s still more work to do.
The expert perspective:
Graham Statt
Pharmaceutical Consultant and former Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) at Alberta Health and Vice Chair of the pCPA
The recommendations for the pCPA are especially poignant. In theory, a broader consideration of value might avoid delays and access issues for Canadian patients on public drug programs. Similarly, “stacking” review processes and committing to targeted timelines are designed to keep us competitive.
Unfortunately, these well-intentioned and broad Task Force recommendations likely won’t be followed. That’s because our public reimbursement system does not have process issues – it has funding issues – and the process itself is by design a way to help slow public spending to create cash flow to support new and expensive innovations. Canada already spends more than ever on pharmaceutical programs, which puts us consistently in the global top 10 for per capita drug spending, but the creation of innovative medicines still far outpaces provinces’ ability to pay for them. In this setting, optimal price will continue to be the key focus for public payers. So, like Sisyphus, manufacturers are cursed to push the proverbial boulder uphill for the eternity of the pCPA decision-making process, and the bigger the innovation, the bigger the boulder.
What we need in Canada is a new injection of cash from the federal government by way of an Innovative Medicines Fund. In our present system, protracted price negations are the only way for payers to bridge the gap between HTA’s recommendations for a price discount and what the provinces are actually willing and able to pay. The outcome is a confidential rebate. In a new model, CDA-AMC could still provide the HTA, but the Innovative Medicines Fund would bridge the gap by topping up pricing.
Here’s how I see it: to gain access to this special pathway, manufacturers would need to request public reimbursement in Canada within a defined time period following marketing authorization. The timelines for HTA and the LOI would also be stringent. If all provinces list the medicine within the allotted timeline, the federal government would receive a “performance bonus” paid by the manufacturer, which would be returned to the Innovative Medicines Fund. This process would sidestep direct price rebates, which should disarm the real and present threat of MFN’s global revenue redistribution scheme. It would also shift those MFN pressures to other comparator countries, thereby ensuring Canada’s place as a Tier One country, at least for medicines within the program.
The model is not perfect – but at least that negotiation would happen once a medicine is listed, and not while patients are waiting for access.
TOPIC:
Data infrastructure and AI
Recommendation #18: Advance national coordination of health data and Real-World Evidence (RWE) and develop pan-Canadian real-time data architecture
This recommendation seeks to coordinate the collection of RWE across Canada to provide more robust data for healthcare decision-making. A recent announcement has earmarked funding for the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) to create a “federated” data infrastructure, leveraging the Vital collaborative health data platform. This would enable nationwide data sharing, while also allowing each province or territory to keep ownership of its own information. The objective is that RWE researchers will be able to share data and models in real time, integrate data throughout the whole patient journey and across different jurisdictions, and collaborate with governments and private companies.
The expert perspective:
Dr. Winson Cheung
Principal Director, Oncology Outcomes, University of Calgary
I think this is an important and highly aspirational recommendation, and very much the direction Canada needs to follow if we want to realize the full potential of RWE. That said, a substantial gap separates the aspiration from the reality.
Canada has tremendous health data assets, but they remain fragmented across provinces, institutions, and data systems, making it difficult and time-consuming to link information across the patient journey or conduct research at a national scale. There are also important differences in how data are captured, coded, and updated across jurisdictions. Even when provinces collect the same variable, the data may not be directly comparable. Importantly, more data do not necessarily mean better RWE. We need richer clinical information, such as performance status, molecular testing and results, and treatment intent, that may not be reliably captured in administrative datasets.
As recommended by the Task Force, better coordination and interoperability could make it possible to answer important questions that a single jurisdiction cannot address. The emphasis on federated approaches is particularly promising, as this could facilitate cross-jurisdictional research while allowing data to remain within existing jurisdictions and governance structures.
But we need to go further. Infrastructure alone will not create a functional national RWE ecosystem. We also need common data standards, streamlined and transparent governance and access processes, sustained funding that incorporates new technologies, like AI and machine learning, and better collaboration across jurisdictions. Most importantly, these systems need to be built with data users, not simply for them. Researchers, clinicians, patients, and policymakers should have a meaningful role in determining what data are needed and how they are accessed and approved for use.
Recommendation #19: Leverage nation-wide health data infrastructure
This recommendation proposes to leverage national health data infrastructure to make it easier to conduct adaptive and digitally enabled trials, collect RWE, and use AI and other tools to look for broader patterns across the data. This should all serve to measure health innovation outcomes and their impact on the healthcare system, generate efficiencies in healthcare delivery, and support the creation and growth of health information technology companies in Canada.
The expert perspective:
Dr Belinda Yap
Sr. Strategic Advisor, Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) & RWE, Innomar Strategies
This recommendation creates an opportunity to scale up our data and to connect signals that are easy to miss when viewing patient journeys in isolation. In specialty care, patient support program (PSP) data can capture recurring access barriers, treatment interruptions, and support needs over the course of therapy. Sometimes, rare or unusual events might look like a local issue or a one-off occurrence, but viewed nationally, a pattern could emerge. Longitudinal PSP data, together with AI, can help reveal combinations and patterns that may never come to light within a single program, dataset, or jurisdiction. That gives Canada an opportunity to turn experiences that once looked isolated into RWE that can inform how future patients are supported.
Recommendation #21: Support the development of health AI
This recommendation supports the further development and refinement of AI in the healthcare environment, to help with processes like decision-making, risk prediction, public health surveillance, health system planning, emergency response, and research.
The expert perspective:
Matthew Norton
General Manager - Healthcare Advisory Services, IQVIA Canada
Canada has tremendous strengths in clinical and health systems research, data science, and artificial intelligence, but we believe the opportunity goes beyond simply developing more AI. Rather, we can create the conditions for AI to be used responsibly in real-world decision-making. This requires timely access to high-quality, linked health data supported by a clear governance model, appropriate privacy safeguards, robust validation, and investment in system capacity to integrate new AI innovations into research, policy and healthcare workflows.
For the pharmaceutical sector, the opportunity is particularly significant. AI can help us better understand patient populations and unmet need, generate RWE, identify variations in care and outcomes, and support more timely and informed decisions across the lifecycle. Ultimately, the success of this recommendation will depend on connecting AI investment with the broader modernization of Canada's health data infrastructure. We need to move beyond promising pilot programs, toward an environment where trusted data, analytics, and AI can sustainably support better decisions for patients and the health system.
References
3. Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force: Report to the ministers of health and industry. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-health-products/drug-products/announcements/pharmaceutical-life-sciences-sector-task-force/report-ministers-health-industry.html