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...

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...

OBJECTIVE The objective was to develop an economic prioritization model to assist those involved in the selection and prioritization of health technology assessment topics and commissioning of HTA projects. METHODS The model used decision analytic techniques to estimate the expected costs and benefits of the health care interventions that were the focus of the HTA question(s) considered by th...

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...

In modern health care systems, the soaring prices of drugs pose at least three major challenges: the growing economic burden of diseases, the uncertainty regarding innovation in health care, and the use of generic drugs and new indications. In this context, the assessment of health care technology is not just about drugs, it is about ensuring that the system's resources, namely financial, yield...

In the past two decades, setting up independent health technology assessment (HTA) agencies has become a popular tool to inform reimbursement decision-making in health care, spreading from Northern European countries across Western Europe but much less so to post-communist countries. Structural political science explanations leave gaps in clarifying this diffusion pattern. This paper proposes a...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to describe the developing health technology assessment (HTA) activities in Brazil, both historically and in the present day. METHODS This report is a descriptive analysis based on personal experiences of the authors and on selected literature. RESULTS Interest in HTA in Brazil began in the mid-1980s. Several seminars and consultations were held, often w...

Economic evaluation of health technologies is routinely applied in the English NHS to assess whether new technologies represent a cost-effective use of health care resources. The current health technology assessment (HTA) process, as implemented by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), considers in its assessment all future health benefits following treatment, whether th...

There is a burgeoning literature in health economic evaluation, with this form of analysis becoming increasingly influential at the health policy making level in a number of countries. However, a search of the literature reveals that in Japan, the world's second largest health care market, very little health economic evaluation has been undertaken. The main reason for the lack of interest in ec...