An assessment of the impact of the NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme

Abstract

It produces high-quality research information on the costs, effectiveness and broader impact of health technologies for those who use, manage and provide care in the NHS. 'Health technologies' are broadly defined to include all interventions used to promote health, prevent and treat disease, and improve rehabilitation and long-term care, rather than settings of care. The research findings from the HTA Programme directly influence decision-making bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the National Screening Committee (NSC). HTA findings also help to improve the quality of clinical practice in the NHS indirectly in that they form a key component of the 'National Knowledge Service'. The HTA Programme is needs-led in that it fills gaps in the evidence needed by the NHS. There are three routes to the start of projects. First is the commissioned route. Suggestions for research are actively sought from people working in the NHS, the public and consumer groups and professional bodies such as royal colleges and NHS trusts. These suggestions are carefully prioritised by panels of independent experts (including NHS service users). The HTA Programme then commissions the research by competitive tender. Secondly, the HTA Programme provides grants for clinical trials for researchers who identify research questions. These are assessed for importance to patients and the NHS, and scientific rigour. Thirdly, through its Technology Assessment Report (TAR) call-off contract, the HTA Programme commissions bespoke reports, principally for NICE, but also for other policy-makers. TARs bring together evidence on the value of specific technologies. Some HTA research projects, including TARs, may take only months, others need several years. They can cost from as little as £40,000 to over £1 million, and may involve synthesising existing evidence, undertaking a trial, or other research collecting new data to answer a research problem. The final reports from HTA projects are peer-reviewed by a number of independent expert referees before publication in the widely read monograph series Health Technology Assessment. Criteria for inclusion in the HTA monograph seriesReports are published in the HTA monograph series if (1) they have resulted from work for the HTA Programme, and (2) they are of a sufficiently high scientific quality as assessed by the referees and editors. Reviews in Health Technology Assessment are termed 'systematic' when the account of the search, appraisal and synthesis methods (to minimise biases and random errors) would, in theory, permit the replication of the review by others.The research reported in this monograph was commissioned by the HTA Programme as project number 03/67/01. The contractual start date was in April 2005. The draft report began editorial review in October 2006 and was accepted for publication in May 2007. As the funder, by devising a commissioning brief, the HTA Programme specified the research question and study design. The authors have been wholly responsib...

Assessing the impact of England's National Health Service R&D Health Technology Assessment program using the “payback” approach

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“…A comprehensive review of studies of the impact from health research programs was linked to the work reported here (8). Several studies examined the payback from diverse research programs (as opposed to individual projects), generally indicating a higher level of impact than is often thought to exist.…”

Engagement in research: an innovative three-stage review of the benefits for health-care performance

“…[33][34][35][36] We assumed, however, that we should interpret our research question to focus on whether or not any identified improvements in the performance of clinicians or health-care organisations had resulted in some way from the processes of their being engaged in research, whether or not that improvement occurred concurrently with the conduct of research or subsequently. In our search for papers it proved challenging to establish the precise inclusion criteria to enable us to focus on this interpretation, and we return to this issue at several points in this report.…”

The Cochrane Collaboration as key player in the struggle for better and more relevant patients- and system-oriented research

“…In the past two decades, many theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches on how to measure research impact and returns have been developed (Banzi et al 2011). A common feature of all these models is that they assess impact on many dimensions and try to integrate multidimensional categorisation of benefit (Hanney et al 2007). A set of indicators and metric is generally associated with each category of impact.…”