Posted by Michael Wonder on 14 Mar 2019
An EU wide approach to HTA: an irrelevant development or an opportunity not to be missed?
14 March 2019 - An EU-wide cooperation on HTA has been proposed recently by the European Commission, focusing on relative effectiveness assessment for pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
This cooperation is operationalised through a proposal for a regulation. While a good step in the right direction, this HTA cooperation framework needs to be more explicit and pragmatic about clinical value definition, what constitutes quality of evidence, how real-world evidence is handled, whether the same assessment requirements will apply for medical devices as they do for pharmaceuticals, and how to safeguard consistency in relative effectiveness assessment interpretation.
If demand-rather than supply-driven, this initiative can deliver wider benefits: Europe can improve its power in global drug design and development, while Member States will have at their disposal more resources to assess performance of interventions in their healthcare systems.
