continuous telemetric ecg monitoring     soltanzadeh l 1 , taheria 2 , reabiee m 3 *     received: 29 may , 2013 accepted: 9 aug , 2013     abstract   background & aims : diabetes mellitus is becoming a major public health problem. telecare can improve the quality of diabetes care by altering the caring environment and care delivery process.   the electrocardiogram (ecg) is the recording of the...

This study analyses why ethical aspects play a minor role in health technology assessment (HTA) studies, even when comprehensive approaches of technology assessment are advocated. Technology is often regarded as a value-neutral tool. At the same time, bioethics is dominated by an engineering model. Ethical contributions to evaluation of medical technology should go beyond issues of application ...

Health technology assessment (HTA) uses a multidisciplinary approach to answer relevant questions regarding the safety, efficacy, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of health technologies. There is growing interest in implementing HTA methods at the hospital level because it could facilitate decision-making regarding acquisition, implementation or discontinuation of technologies or interventi...

Current thinking about the methodology of health technology assessment (HTA) seems to be dominated by two fundamental tensions: [1] between maintaining a tight focus on quality-adjusted life-years and broadening its concern out to pay attention to a broader range of factors, and [2] between thinking of the evaluative dimensions that matter as being objectively important factors or as ones that ...

While the practice of comparing treatment outcomes can be traced to ancient times, the development of comparativeeffectiveness research (CER) as a scientific discipline is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the United States, CER has a pedigree based in health technology assessment, stemming from early efforts by the US Office of Technology Assessment to justify the use of expensive new medical...

OBJECTIVES To describe and explore the reasons for the current health technology assessment (HTA) landscape in the United States. METHODS Relying on multiple historical literature and other documents as well as drawing on personal experiences and observations, we describe, evaluate, and explain the evolving and dynamic HTA-related evidence landscape. RESULTS The present HTA-related landscap...

In recent years, multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has emerged as a likely alternative to address shortcomings in health technology assessment (HTA) by offering a more holistic perspective to value assessment and acting as an alternative priority setting tool. In this paper, we argue that MCDA needs to subscribe to robust methodological processes related to the selection of objectives,...