Analysis of Duplication and Timing of Health Technology Assessments on Medical Devices in Europe

Abstract

The findings suggest that efficient collaboration may help to save scarce resources and time of HTA institutes in Europe. Efficient collaboration as such needs to shift the focus beyond the time span of 1 year, and build on each's others work from previous assessments.

Pre-reimbursement: early assessment for coverage decisions

“…These networks shall not only help to efficiently allocate scarce resources and support pre-coverage decisions, but also to avoid redundancies [25]. A recent publication [34] has shown that the number of duplicate reports on technologies ranges from seven to 22. This leaves much room for improvement with regards to efficient cooperation between EU countries.…”

The transferability of health technology assessment: the European perspective with focus on central and Eastern European countries

“…Information Classification: General widespread systematic search, review, scientific interpretation and reporting of evidence on the same technology is seen as unnecessary duplication [29,30]. However, this does not apply to all parts of HTA reports, therefore the question of transferability of HTA surfaces, when cross-border information sharing is being considered [31].…”

Towards a regulation of HTA in Europe: the proposal from the European Commission

“…On the paper, it seems that the European Commission's proposal for a regulation of HTA may hit the target assuring, from one hand, the central coordination of the HTA activities and, from the other, leaving to Member States the room for further analyses aimed to explore highly context-dependent aspects. At a first glance, this may be translate in a reduction of duplication in the assessment activities, a well-known phenomenon that, for example in the case of medical devices, can count from 7 to 22 reports on the same technology over a time-span of 13.5 years [8]. Of course, at the very bottom, there should be a robust base of trust and shared methodology that allow the Member States to build on each other's conclusions.…”