OBJECTIVES: The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is a body that has gathered worldwide respect for its fully comprehensive clinical and economic review of pharmaceutical agents. However, it has been criticized for taking too long to conduct assessments and, as a consequence of this, only being able to appraise a subset of all new agents coming to market. Other Health technology Asessment (HTA) bodies achieve a much higher output of treatment appraisals with a much shorter turnaround time (e.g. in 2013 NICE appraised 27 drugs compared to 57 by the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE), Ireland). METHODS: A thematic analysis of the appraisal processes of the NCPE was conducted to determine if any key criteria could be extrapolated that could potentially increase the speed and output of the NICE appraisal process. RESULTS: One particularly interesting aspect of the NCPE system was revealed – a 2 to 4 week rapid preliminary review that all drugs must undergo to determine the necessity of a full pharmaco-economic assessment (PEA). Full PEAs are reserved for products with high cost, significant budget impact, and/or questionable value for money. This enables products that are cheaper and at least as efficacious as the relevant comparator to gain rapid market access. It also enables the NCPE to focus their time and resources on the products that will have a substantial/questionable clinical and/or economic impact. CONCLUSIONS: Adoption of such a systematic rapid review procedure into the NICE appraisal process with reimbursement conditional on NICE approval could similarly enable a better focussing of NICE resources to where it is most impactful. This could also incentivise pharmaceutical companies to drop their prices to gain rapid market access rather than going through the expensive and time consuming procedure of a full NICE submission.