Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) are a key means by which national governments have responded to the challenge of ensuring equitable public access to a new range of medicines and treatment options within the context of limited national budgets for healthcare. In this paper, we apply a regulatory governance frame to the study of the Swedish process fo...

BACKGROUND It is vitally important that there is a connection between health research and clinical practice. Indications as to the impact of the research on evidence-based practice and policy can be obtained by tracking the use of outputs of health research, especially its use in clinical guidelines (CGs). This study aims to assess the proportion of National Institute for Health and Care Excell...

To the Editor: We want to comment on the study by Martelli et al. in Volume 23:4, which appears to have several mistakes and seems to be outdated and probably biased. Several agencies mentioned in the study now have different tasks and mandates and accordingly have different denominations. The CCOHTA for example has been renamed CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health) in Ap...

Lessons from health technology assessment (HTA) organizations around the world are emerging, and only some of them are about evidence. Other lessons pertain to governance, communication, trust, politics, and the persistence of local “practice patterns” for evidence evaluations. This should not come as a surprise. HTA organizations worldwide have different constituencies and organizational struc...

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 ...

daniels, porteny and urrutia et al make a good case for the idea that that public decisions ought to be made not only “in the light of” evidence but also “on the basis of” budget impact, financial protection and equity. health technology assessment (hta) should, they say, be accordingly expanded to consider matters additional to safety and cost-effectiveness. they also complain that most hta re...

I. The workshop begins with an introduction by T. Larsen of key concepts and basic typology of health technology assessment (HTA), which will be illustrated by analytical elements from integrated home care. II. Questions for debate as presented and moderated by the workshop chair [Silvina Santana, University of Aveiro, Portugal] shall focus: 1) In which cases are HTA relevant? It is suggested t...

OBJECTIVES This study examines the content and role of ethical analysis in health technology assessment (HTA) and horizon scanning publications. It proposes that ethical analysis in HTA is of at least two different types: an ethics of HTA and an ethics in HTA. METHODS I examine the critical differences between these approaches through the examples of the analysis of genetic screening for brea...

The first steps towards Health Technology Assessment (HTA) were taken in Romania between 1992-2002 when some form of mentorship was performed in this area with Canadian support [1]; later on, from 2002 to 2011 HTA remained a subject only for the academic and research purposes. Only the pressure brought by the Memorandum of Understanding between Romanian Government with International Monetary Fu...