The Global Fund is experiencing increased pressure to optimize results and improve its impact per dollar spent. It is also in transition from a provider of emergency funding, to a long-term, sustainable financing mechanism. This paper assesses the efficacy of current Global Fund investment and examines how health technology assessments (HTAs) can be used to provide guidance on the relative prio...

Providing universal access to innovative, high-cost technologies leads to tensions in today's health care systems. The tension becomes particularly evident in the context of scarce resources, where the risk of taking contentious coverage decisions increases rapidly. To ensure economic sustainability, the payers of health care think that the benefits from the use of the new technologies need to ...

PURPOSE Introducing new health technologies, including medical devices, into a local setting in a safe, effective, and transparent manner is a complex process, involving many disciplines and players within an organization. Decision making should be systematic, consistent, and transparent. It should involve translating and integrating scientific evidence, such as health technology assessment (HT...

BACKGROUND For health technology assessment (HTA) to be more policy relevant and for health technology-related decision-making to be truly evidence-based, promoting knowledge translation (KT) is of vital importance. Although some research has focused on KT of HTA, there is a dearth of literature on KT determinants and the situation in developing countries and transitional societies remains larg...

Background Abstracts of systematic reviews (SRs) play an important role in dissemination of results, with most evidence users consulting the abstract before reading a full article and some only ever consulting the abstract. However, abstracts of SRs are often poorly reported. The PRISMA statement (Liberati et al., 2009) for reporting SRs was extended to include guidelines for the production of ...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to develop and apply an instrument to map the level of health technology assessment (HTA) development at country level in selected countries. We examined middle-income countries (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and Russia) and countries well-known for their comprehensive HTA programs (Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom). METHODS A...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to assist in the development of a health technology assessment (HTA) program for the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Republic of Kazakhstan METHODS Mentoring of an initial HTA program in Kazakhstan was provided by the Canadian Society for International Health (CSIH) by means of a partnership with the Kazakhstan MOH. HTA materials, courses, and one-on-one s...

To the Editor: We want to comment on the study by Martelli et al. in Volume 23:4, which appears to have several mistakes and seems to be outdated and probably biased. Several agencies mentioned in the study now have different tasks and mandates and accordingly have different denominations. The CCOHTA for example has been renamed CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health) in Ap...

OBJECTIVES To develop a framework for defining the potential value of diagnostic testing, and discuss its implications for the health-care delivery system. METHODS We reviewed the conceptual and empirical literature related to the valuing of diagnostic tests, and used this information to create a framework for characterizing their value. We then made inferences about the impact of this framew...

A new health technology assessment section is to start in Critical Care. The use of new technology is germane to critical care medicine [1]. Consequently, intensivists are obliged to critically appraise the technology in use. There are already publicly funded bodies performing the task of sifting through development data on these innovations, so what could be new about technology assessment? Ou...