The quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) has become a widely used measure of health outcomes for use in informing decision making in health technology assessment. However, there is growing recognition of outcomes beyond health within the health sector and in related sectors such as social care and public health. This paper presents the advantages and disadvantages of ten possible approaches coveri...

Canada's health system is a unique combination of public financing and private provision. With the significant government role in financing health services, health technology assessment (HTA) has found a ready audience as a form of policy research. In addition, Canada has been a leader in HTA and is entering a phase of deepening and maturation of HTA activities. The relative absence of dramatic...

This article describes the judgements used to interpret evidence in evidence-based medicine (EBM) and health technology assessment (HTA). It outlines the methods and processes of EBM and HTA. Respectively, EBM and HTA are approaches to medical clinical decision making and efficient allocation of scarce health resources. At the heart of both is a concern to review and synthesise evidence, especi...

BACKGROUND The way people use health technology assessment (HTA) terms varies considerably across Europe. Such variation can lead to misunderstandings when reading HTA reports from different contexts. This work is one of the outputs of the EUnetHTA Project and was undertaken between 2006 and 2008. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to develop a glossary of HTA adaptation terms to help reduc...

OBJECTIVES We explore how broader aspects of a treatment's value and the impact of the condition on patients not captured by routine health technology assessment (HTA) methods using clinical and economic evidence, defined as "other considerations," may influence HTA processes in different settings. METHODS Countries included were England, Scotland, Sweden, and France. Data sources were the pu...

This article describes methods used to estimate parameters governing long-term survival, or times to other events, for health economic models. Specifically, the focus is on methods that combine shorter-term individual-level survival data from randomized trials with longer-term external data, thus using the longer-term data to aid extrapolation of the short-term data. This requires assumptions a...

Two recent health technology assessment (HTA) reports published in Germany focused on non-pharmacological interventions for patients with dementia. One of the major results was the poor methodological quality of the studies in this field. This paper concisely presents the main quantitative and qualitative findings of the HTA report published by the German Agency for HTA at the Institute of Medi...

OBJECTIVES The mainly tax-paid healthcare system in Denmark is decentralized with three defined policy and management levels. Health technology assessment (HTA) as a concept was introduced in the beginning of the 1980s. Significant implementation only happened when the first national strategy for HTA was developed by relevant stakeholders and issued as an official document in 1996. The introduc...

Conventional Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is usually conducted at a point in time at which the development of the respective technology may no longer be influenced. By this time developers and/or purchasers may have misinvested resources. Thus the demand for Technology Assessment (TA) which incorporates appropriate methods during early development stages of a technology becomes apparent. ...

New scenarios are emerging in the European and worldwide context: the ageing of society, the climate changes, the increasing of health inequalities and the financial crisis. In this context, the scientific community and the decision-makers agree on the role of health in all policies (HiAP) strategy in improving the population's health. The HiAP takes into account factors not strictly related to...