OBJECTIVES To provide an overview of the development of health technology assessment (HTA) in Germany since the 1990s. METHODS Analysis of key documents (e.g. literature, laws, and other official documentation) and personal experiences. RESULTS Health technology assessment (HTA) entered the political agenda in Germany only in the mid-1990s, basically as the result of a top-down approach tow...

Health systems are placing more and more emphasis on designing and delivering services that are focused on the patient, and there is a growing interest in patient aspects of health policy research and health technology assessment (HTA). Only a few HTA agencies use and invest in scientific methods to generate knowledge and evidence about the patient aspects of a given technology. This raises que...

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 Health technology assessment (HTA) programs influence practice on a broad scale through reimbursement decisions or national guidelines. Hospital-based HTA programs inform clinical decisions at the local level. Typically, they do this by adapting general HTA to their local setting, or by creating new HTA. However, unlike payer-based HTA organizations, hospital-based HTA organizations ...

Embedding health technology assessment (HTA) in a fair process has great potential to capture societal values relevant to public reimbursement decisions on health technologies. However, the development of such processes for priority setting has largely been theoretical. In this paper, we provide further practical lead ways on how these processes can be implemented. We first present the misconce...

all societies face the need to make judgments about what interventions (both public health and personal medical) to provide to their populations under reasonable resource constraints. their decisions should be informed by good evidence and arguments from health technology assessment (hta). but if hta restricts itself to evaluations of safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness, it risks being vie...

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...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this work was to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the health technology assessment (HTA) concept in the scientific literature through a scientometric approach. METHODS A literature search was conducted, by selecting publications, as well as news from the media, containing "health technology assessment" in their title, abstracts, or keywords. We then u...

OBJECTIVES Adapting health technology assessment (HTA) reports for different contexts could reduce the need for multiple reports on the same health technology with resultant saving of time and resources. This article describes an instrument, the adaptation toolkit, which has been developed to aid in the process of adaptation of HTA reports. METHODS The toolkit was developed by a partnership o...

Embedding health technology assessment (HTA) in a fair process has great potential to capture societal values relevant to public reimbursement decisions on health technologies. However, the development of such processes for priority setting has largely been theoretical. In this paper, we provide further practical lead ways on how these processes can be implemented. We first present the misconce...