BACKGROUND Various decisions have been made on technology application at all levels of the health system in different countries around the world. Health technology assessment is considered as one of the best scientific tools at the service of policy- makers. This study attempts to investigate the current challenges of Iran's health technology assessment and provide appropriate strategies to est...

Since the late 1970s, many European countries have established health technology assessment (HTA) systems to inform coverage and pricing decisions. These countries use HTA to systematically determine the relative ‘value for money’ provided by new technologies and to give providers and patients information to make treatment choices. This, in turn, serves to encourage the efficient and effective ...

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 ...

T research findings from the NHS R&D Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme influence key decision-making bodies such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the National Screening Committee (NSC) who rely on HTA outputs to help raise standards of care. HTA findings also help to improve the quality of the service in the NHS indirectly in that they form a key component...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to assist in the development of a health technology assessment (HTA) program for the Ministry of Health (MOH) of the Republic of Kazakhstan METHODS Mentoring of an initial HTA program in Kazakhstan was provided by the Canadian Society for International Health (CSIH) by means of a partnership with the Kazakhstan MOH. HTA materials, courses, and one-on-one s...

Health technology assessment (HTA) uses a multidisciplinary approach to answer relevant questions regarding the safety, efficacy, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of health technologies. There is growing interest in implementing HTA methods at the hospital level because it could facilitate decision-making regarding acquisition, implementation or discontinuation of technologies or interventi...

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...