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...

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...

BACKGROUND New technologies constitute an important cost-driver in healthcare, but the dynamics that lead to their emergence remains poorly understood from a health policy standpoint. The goal of this paper is to clarify how entrepreneurs, investors, and regulatory agencies influence the value of emerging health technologies. METHODS Our 5-year qualitative research program examined the proces...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to review the history of health technology assessment (HTA) in Italy. METHODS Founded in 1978, the Italian National Health Service (NHS) has been strongly regionalized mainly after a constitutional reform, which started a devolution process. HTA started in the 1980s at the National Institute of Health and in a few University Hospitals, with a focus on big ...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to get insight in what criteria as presented in Health technology assessment (HTA) studies are important for decision makers in healthcare priority setting. METHODS We performed a discrete choice experiment among Dutch healthcare professionals (policy makers, HTA experts, advanced HTA students). In twenty-seven choice sets, we asked respondents to elect re...

Similar to other health policy initiatives, there is a growing movement to involve consumers in decisions affecting their treatment options. Access to treatments can be impacted by decisions made during a health technology assessment (HTA), i.e., the rigorous assessment of medical interventions such as drugs, vaccines, devices, materials, medical and surgical procedures and systems. The purpose...

In 1989, Poland started to slowly release itself not only from the burden of a half-century of communist indoctrination and soviet exploitation, but also from the consequences of the Semashko model of healthcare organization: low doctors' salaries, primary care based on multispecialty groups, overdeveloped hospital infrastructure, and limited access to sophisticated interventions overcome by pa...

Since the 1990s, health policy makers in Finland have been supportive of evidence-based medicine and approaches to implement its results. The Finnish Office for Health Technology Assessment (Finohta) has grown from a small start in 1995 to a medium-sized health technology assessment (HTA) agency, with special responsibility in providing assessments to underpin national policies in screening. Ex...