Web-based assessments can be used in different phases of education in order to support students and make learning easier and more effective for them. This support can range from the assessment of readiness for a particular educational institution, over methods which improve the learning process itself such as peer assessment, to the assessment of the progress and knowledge level by the use of p...

BACKGROUND The purpose of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is to make the best possible summary of the evidence regarding specific health interventions in order to influence health care and policy decisions. The need for decision makers to find relevant HTA data when it is needed is a barrier to its usefulness. These barriers are highest in rural areas and amongst isolated practitioners. ME...

OBJECTIVE The objective was to develop an economic prioritization model to assist those involved in the selection and prioritization of health technology assessment topics and commissioning of HTA projects. METHODS The model used decision analytic techniques to estimate the expected costs and benefits of the health care interventions that were the focus of the HTA question(s) considered by th...

Introduction: Assessment of ethics issues is an important part of health technology assessments (HTA). However, in terms of existence of quality assessment tools, ethics for HTA is methodologically underdeveloped in comparison to other areas of HTA, such as clinical or cost effectiveness. Objective: To methodologically advance ethics for HTA by: (1) proposing and elaborating Q-SEA, the first in...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that health technology assessment units located in hospitals tend to be more optimistic toward technologies that are currently in use in their organization than technologies that are not. The data include 108 health technologies assessed in 87 full-scale health technology assessment reports produced by the four main local health technology assessment units ...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to compare post-authorisation measures (PAMs) from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) with data requests in fixed-termed conditional appraisals of early benefit assessments from the German Federal Joint Committee (G-BA). METHODS Medicinal products with completed benefit assessments during an assessment period of 3.5 years were considered. PAMs extracted f...

Occupational therapists have been conducting functional assessments since World War I, and this accumulated experience has taught us several critical lessons. First, a comprehensive profile of a patient's functioning requires multiple assessment methods. Second, assessment content and measurement constructs must change with the times. Third, technology can enhance and extend functional assessme...

BACKGROUND Publicly funded trials regularly fail to recruit their target sample size or find a significant positive result. Adaptive clinical trials which may partly mediate against the problems are not often applied. In this paper we investigate the potential of a form of adaption in a clinical trial - a futility analysis - to see if it has potential to improve publicly funded trials. METHOD...

OBJECTIVES Synthesizing qualitative research is an important means of ensuring the needs, preferences, and experiences of patients are taken into account by service providers and policy makers, but the range of methods available can appear confusing. This study presents the methods for synthesizing qualitative research most used in health research to-date and, specifically those with a potentia...

Best practice dictates that security requirements be based on risk assessments; however, simplistic risk assessments that result in lists of risks or sets of scenarios do not provide sufficient information to prioritize requirements when faced with resource constraints (e.g., time, money). Multi-attribute risk assessments provide a convenient framework for systematically developing quantitative...