Background Brazil has sought to use economic evaluation to support healthcare decision-making processes. While a number of health economic evaluations (HEEs) have been conducted, no study has systematically reviewed the quality of Brazilian HEE. The objective of this systematic review was to provide an overview regarding the state of HEE research and to evaluate the number, characteristics, and...

Introduction: Health technology assessment (HTA) in Poland supports reimbursement decisions via the Polish HTA Agency (AOTMiT), whose guidelines were updated in 2016. Methods: We identified key changes introduced by the update and, before guideline publication, analysed discrepancies between AOTMiT assessments and the submitting marketing authorisation holders (MAHs) to elucidate the context of...

BACKGROUND The grades of recommendation, assessment, development and evaluation (GRADE) approach is widely implemented in systematic reviews, health technology assessment and guideline development organisations throughout the world. We have previously reported on the development of the Semi-Automated Quality Assessment Tool (SAQAT), which enables a semi-automated validity assessment based on GR...

This paper has been prepared on the basis of available information of which the Foundation is aware from public literature and expert opinion and attempts to be current to the date of publication. Additional information and comments relative to the information paper are welcome and should be sent to: Acknowledgements The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research is grateful to the follow...

Due to major advances in the information technology, telemedicine applications are ready for a widespread use. Nonetheless, to allow their diffusion in National Health Care Systems (NHCSs) specific methodologies of health technology assessment (HTA) should be used to assess the standardization, the overall quality, the interoperability, the addressing to legal, economic and cost benefit aspects...

Discrete event simulation (DES) is a form of computer-based modeling that provides an intuitive and flexible approach to representing complex systems. It has been used in a wide range of health care applications. Most early applications involved analyses of systems with constrained resources, where the general aim was to improve the organization of delivered services. More recently, DES has inc...

OBJECTIVES Adapting health technology assessment (HTA) reports for different contexts could reduce the need for multiple reports on the same health technology with resultant saving of time and resources. This article describes an instrument, the adaptation toolkit, which has been developed to aid in the process of adaptation of HTA reports. METHODS The toolkit was developed by a partnership o...

OBJECTIVE To identify characteristics (factors) about health technology assessment (HTA) decisions that are important to the public in determining whether public engagement should be undertaken and the reasons for these choices. DESIGN Focus groups using a nominal group technique to identify and rank factors relevant to public engagement in HTA decision-making. Thematic analysis was also unde...

Embedding health technology assessment (HTA) in a fair process has great potential to capture societal values relevant to public reimbursement decisions on health technologies. However, the development of such processes for priority setting has largely been theoretical. In this paper, we provide further practical lead ways on how these processes can be implemented. We first present the misconce...

OBJECTIVES To assess the clinical and the economic impacts of intraprocedural use of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) in patients undergoing percutaneous radiofrequency ablation for small (<2.5 cm) hepatocellular carcinomas. METHODS One hundred and forty-eight hepatocellular carcinomas in 93 patients were treated by percutaneous radiofrequency ablation and immediate assessment by intraproc...