Healthcare technology is a two-edged sword - it offers new and better treatment to a wider range of people and, at the same time, is a major driver of increasing costs in health systems. Many countries have developed sophisticated systems of health technology assessment (HTA) to inform decisions about new investments in new healthcare interventions. In this paper, we question whether HTA is als...

Methods The Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Health Technology Assessment (LBI-HTA) implemented an EAAS specifically for oncologic drugs in 2009 [2]. Due to rising costs for cancer therapies, oncologic drugs are of importance throughout Europe and are therefore assessed concurrently by health technology assessment (HTA) agencies leading to considerable redundancies. Experiences of the LB...

The article by Daniels and colleagues on expanding the scope of health technology assessment (HTA) to embrace ethical analysis has received endorsement and criticism from commentators in this journal. Referring to this debate, we examine in this article the extent and locus of ethical analysis in HTA processes. An expansion/no-expansion framing of HTA is, in our view, not very fruitful. We argu...

Introduction With ever increasing burden of disease and limited resources, health technology assessment (HTA) is required for efficient resources allocation priority setting in healthcare. The objective this study was to establish the baseline HTA evidence generation use Zimbabwe. Methods In 2019, we convened a stakeholder workshop on at University Presentations processes, current healthcare re...

The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) organized a one-day workshop with clinicians, health economic experts, and health technology appraisal experts to discuss the equity of patient access to novel medical technologies in Europe. Two index technologies were considered: implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and drug-eluting stents (DES). The use of ICDs range from 35 implants/million...

BACKGROUND In an era of a growing economic pressure for all health systems, the interest for "disinvestment" in healthcare increased. In this context, evidence based approaches such as Health Technology Assessment (HTA) are needed both to invest and to disinvest in health technologies. In order to investigate the extent of application of HTA in this field, methodological projects/frameworks, ca...

Objective Previous work has shown that 98% of NIHR Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme projects publish in Health Technology Assessment (the peer reviewed journal for the NIHR HTA Programme). 68% of clinical trials funded by the US NIH publish, with 46% publishing within 30 months of trial completion. This study aimed to assess the time-to-publication of HTA Programme primary research ...

BACKGROUND Recognizing the importance of increased patient participation in healthcare decisions leads decision makers to consider effective ways to incorporate patient perspectives in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) processes. The implementation of local health HTA units in university hospitals in Quebec provides a unique opportunity to foster an increased participation of patients in decis...

BACKGROUND Patient involvement is widely acknowledged to be a valuable component in health technology assessment (HTA) and healthcare decision making. However, quantitative approaches to ascertain patients' preferences for treatment endpoints are not yet established. The objective of this study is to introduce the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a preference elicitation method in HTA. Based...