Health Technology Assessment

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a multidisciplinary process that summaries information about the medical, social, economic, and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology or healthcare intervention, in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, robust manner. It aims to inform the formulation of safe, effective, health policies that are patient focused and seek to achieve best value. HTA forms a component of formal decision-making processes relating to health technology reimbursement and market access in multiple jurisdictions internationally.

Health economic evaluation is a set of economic tools that form part of the multidisciplinary HTA process, and which are concerned with the generation of evidence on value for money or cost effectiveness, which is useful for informing decision-makers on the efficient allocation of scarce healthcare resources within budget constrained health systems. The set of tools include cost utility analysis, cost effectiveness analysis, cost benefit analysis, cost minimisation analysis, cost consequence analysis, and budget impact analysis. These tools may be employed using data collected via clinical trials, which may or may not be supplemented via decision analytic modelling, which are populated using data sourced, extracted and synthesised from external sources using evidence synthesis methodologies.

At the Institute for Clinical Trials, the health economic evaluation team, which are based at the Health Economics and Policy Analysis Centre (HEPAC), provide a range of expertise and support on the conduct of health economic evaluation for the purposes of generating data that can go to inform HTA, reimbursement, and market access decision-making processes.