OBJECTIVES: The pharmacoeconomic litrature shows that one of the means available to HMOs for wisely using the medical budget is the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee (PTC). The present procedure for the hospital PTCs was written by the Ministry of Health in 1978. The aim of the study was to investigate the Israeli hospitals PTCs work. METHODS: This study was based upon a questionnarire which included subjects from the PTCs procedure and also subjects that the PTC dealt with in the late nineties. The questionnarire was sent in October 1999 to 51 hospitals. The information was processed on Excel software. RESULTS: Hospital responses were 41/51 (80.4%). Thirty one hospitals reported having PTC and answered the questionnaire, ten hospitals reported not-having PTC at all. The PTCs chairperson appointed is a department director as demanded by the Ministry Procedure by 12 (41%) of the hospitals, the deputy chairperson nomination matched by 2 (7%) hospitals, organizer of the PTC nomination matched by 20 (69%) of the hospitals. The attending doctors specialities are: intern, pediatrics, surgery, gynecology, infection diseases, anesthesiology and mental health. Nine (31%) hospitals reported having a PTC procedure, 28 (97%) hospitals are checking requests for enlarging the local formulary and just 25 (86%) recommend of formulary reduction; 20 (69%) hospital PTCs recommended 50 guidelines to the local management and 28 of them were addopted. CONCLUSION: From the returned questionaries it seems that no PTC keeps the entire procedure. In 1999, the local PTCs reported adding 494 medicines and decreasing 48, which means a total of 446 medicines added. One hundred seventy nine members of PTCs formed 50 guidelines; 28 of them were accepted by the local management. There is no control of the Ministry of Health on the PTCs procedures implementation; the procedure has not been upgraded since 1978 and it is not familiar to most of the hospitals.