MeTA pilot countries are developing strategies to promote greater transparency and accountability regarding policies, practices, and outcomes in the pharmaceutical sector. They have committed to disclosing, analyzing, and using over time data in the following four core areas described in the MeTA project document:

1. Medicines registration and quality assurance;
2. Availability of medicines;
3. Price of medicines;
4. Policies and practices concerning the promotion of medicines.

For each core area, disclosed information should cover policies – the laws and regulations that are in place; practices – suggested procedures to follow and actual practices; and results –achievements in the core area. The objectives of describing the current disclosure status of information in the core areas are to:

1. enable the national MeTA stakeholders to prioritize potential MeTA country activities to facilitate progressive disclosure over time; and
2. create a baseline against which changes in transparency and disclosure during the MeTA pilot implementation can be measured.

This brief describes a process for accounting of data disclosures as envisioned by MeTA. The first section provides a brief framework for exploring disclosure status in a systematic way. The second section reviews the rationale for disclosing each type of pharmaceutical sector data and gives an overview of some possible data sources and key items to be disclosed in each area of disclosure. The third section provides a series of tables for collecting and presenting data on the disclosure status of key categories of pharmaceutical sector information.

To aid understanding, this information on data disclosure should be supplemented by contextual information on the medicines supply chain, access, price, affordability, and rational use of medicines. These data will be collected as part of an accompanying Pharmaceutical Sector Scan that will also be implemented as part of the baseline assessment. These contextual data will aid in the interpretation of the information on the status of disclosed data.