AIM To provide insights into the capacity to conduct health technology assessment (HTA) in Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE), taking account of technical, financial, networking, and human resources. METHODS An e-mail survey of 257 CESEE key informants involved in HTA was undertaken between March and April 2014. Contact e-mail addresses were identified from the internet. The s...

BACKGROUND The Health Technology Assessment (HTA) approach, which provides scientific support for the decisions taken within the health field, is of increasing importance worldwide. In a context of limited resources, HTA has the potential of being an efficient tool for addressing the sustainability problems and the allocation choices arising from the constant increase in demand. AIM This stud...

BACKGROUND Following approximately 10 years from the beginning of Iran's national Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme, the present study aims to evaluate its success by examining the impact of HTA and identifying the determinant factors leading to the implementation of HTA report results. METHODS The triangulation method was employed herein. HTA reports were initially identified and ...

The founding disciplines of HTA are clearly scientific, and have been firmly based among the natural sciences. However, common definitions of HTA indicate that HTA is something more than the "pure application of science". This article investigates whether this "something" also makes HTA an art. The question of whether HTA is a science or an art is pursued in two specific and historically rich d...

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...

The opportunity cost of inappropriate health policy decisions is greater in Central and Eastern European (CEE) compared with Western European (WE) countries because of poorer population health and more limited healthcare resources. Application of health technology assessment (HTA) prior to healthcare financing decisions can improve the allocative efficiency of scarce resources. However, few CEE...

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 This article presents an overview of the practical methods and tools to support transnational Health Technology Assessment (HTA) that were developed and pilot tested by the European network for HTA (EUnetHTA), which involved a total of sixty-four Partner organizations. METHODS The methods differ according to scope and purpose of each of the tools developed. They included, for examp...