Posted by Michael Wonder on 14 Jan 2019
Mandatory or voluntary? A sticking point for European HTA
10 January 2019 - The long road to unified European Health Technology Assessment is continuing.
It has become clear that the mandatory – or not – nature of European Joint Clinical Assessments (JCAs) is a sticking point.
The ambitions for a European JCA – not a full HTA but rather focusing on the first four domains of EUnetHTAs core model, including identification of a health problem and current technology, the examination of the technical characteristics of the technology, its relative safety, and its relative clinical effectiveness – is the culmination of years of work to explore how member states in the European Union could make the most of the plethora of work done to assess new technologies.
A proposal for a Regulation on HTA to formalise sharing of JCAs, particularly through ensuring JCAs are taken into account and member states don’t do the work again, was tabled in January 2018. At the heart of the proposals is the idea of doing it once, and doing it well.
