The National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) should be given greater freedom to assess all licensed drugs, MPs have said.
The Commons health select committee's report also said the process of approving drugs for NHS use in England and Wales was too slow, particularly in comparison with the process in Scotland.
Committee chairman Kevin Barron called for a faster two-stage process in which NICE assessed all drugs and not simply those selected by the Department of Health.
"What we would like to see is effectively a two-stage process, one where all drugs are looked at when their licences are given so that there is an assessment made in the very short-term about whether the drugs can be made available," Barron said.
"We do believe that (change) could get drugs into the market that are clinically and cost-effective a lot quicker than they do (currently). Then over time a further assessment can be made and that initial assessment may want to change."
But the Labour MP noted: "Overall we believe that Nice is doing a good job, its doing the job that government and Parliament expected it to do - but it could do better."
Nice chief executive Andrew Dillon acknowledged that it was possible to speed up the evaluation process.
However, he said that it depended upon the Department of Health making decisions more quickly on which drugs it wanted Nice to assess.
"I think we are too slow at starting our evaluations of some of the things that are referred to us," he told the BBC.
"We have to move more quickly to make sure that we get the requests from the Department of Health to start work on the treatments we look at."
Asked if Nice should be charged with assessing all drugs, once licensed for use, Dillon said: "We would certainly be very happy to do that; there are quite a lot of new treatments that are licensed, new indications for new drugs that are relatively simple for the NHS to make decisions on and to absorb."
