BACKGROUND Public and patient involvement in the different stages of the health technology assessment (HTA) process is increasingly encouraged. The selection of topics for assessment, which includes identifying and prioritizing HTA questions, is a constant challenge for HTA agencies because the number of technologies requiring an assessment exceeds the resources available. Public and patient in...

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...

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 ...

We developed a novel Plasmodium falciparum genotyping strategy based on the heteroduplex tracking assay (HTA) method commonly used to genotype viruses. Because it can detect both sequence and size polymorphisms, we hypothesized that HTA is more sensitive than current methods. To test this hypothesis, we compared the ability of HTA and a nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to detect genetic d...

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...

BACKGROUND Health technology assessment (HTA) has been continuously used for value-based healthcare decisions over the last decade. Healthcare databases represent an important source of information for HTA, which has seen a surge in use in Western countries. Although HTA agencies have been established in Asia-Pacific region, application and understanding of healthcare databases for HTA is rathe...

OBJECTIVE To explore perceptions of the use of health technology assessment (HTA) in the Galician public health system, identify opinions on the usefulness of the products and services developed by the Galician Health Technology Assessment Agency (avalia-t), and determine the barriers and facilitators to the transfer of results to clinical practice. METHOD We performed a qualitative study bas...

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 While evaluation of ethical aspects in health technology assessment (HTA) has gained much attention during the past years, the integration of ethics in HTA practice still presents many challenges. In response to the increasing demand for expansion of health technology assessment (HTA) methodology to include ethical issues more systematically, this article reports on a multi-stage stu...

BACKGROUND Whether type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) in the absence of hypertension (HTA) and coronary artery disease (CAD) affects left ventricular (LV) phenotype and function among asymptomatic DM patients that can be easily discovered in everyday practice, what is the clinical risk profile for diabetic cardiomyopathy and how HTA and CAD modulate LV structure and function above diabetic cardiomyo...