Improving ethics analysis in health technology assessment

Abstract

To act on these recommendations for ethics analysis, we offer these three steps forward: acknowledge and use relevant expertise, further develop models for conducting and reporting ethics analyses, and make use of untapped resources in the literature.

Ethics for end-of-life treatments: Metastatic colorectal cancer is one example

“…HTA claims to include the medical, economic, legal and ethical implications of technologies. Unfortunately, although ethics is an acknowledged part of HTA, there is scant evidence that ethical issues are commonly addressed to assess treatments [52][53][54].…”

Regional HTA in Italy: Promising or confusing?

“…However, this is hardly surprising, since the very ambitious definition of HTA has led to similar results abroad too. For instance, the scant evidence of addressing ethical issues in our survey is widespread elsewhere [9,10].…”

Cost-effectiveness of trastuzumab in metastatic breast cancer: Mainly a matter of price in the EU?

“…Although ethics is always claimed to be a very important HTA component, its implications on specific technologies are hardly ever reported [20,21], so the lack of ethical studies on TR was not surprising. The only study indirectly concerning TR was a qualitative survey conducted in a Dutch teaching hospital [22] on a few terminal patients (15) with MBC or metastatic colon-rectal cancer.…”