The European Commission is considering strengthening European cooperation on health technology assessment (HTA) and will open a public consultation in the course of this month on the five options identified in the roadmap it published in September.
Health technology encompasses everything that may be used to promote good health, prevent, diagnose or treat an illness or in rehabilitation or long-term care. It covers, for example, medicinal products, medical devices and procedures and the organisation of healthcare systems. Evaluation of health technology allows public authorities to determine the relative effectiveness of new technologies against those that already exist and, ultimately, make decisions on allocating financial resources.
On 14 September, the European Commission published a 22-page roadmap arguing the need for stronger cooperation in this area in an ageing society at a time of reduced funding. At present, the member states which have set up national health technology assessment bodies cooperate informally within the network set up by Directive 2011/24/EU on cross-border healthcare. Three joint initiatives to strengthen cooperation have been launched since 2010, the last beginning in June 2016.
This approach is not efficient or sustainable enough, the Commission concludes in its roadmap. It identifies a number of problems: the limited impact of the joint action at Community level on national decision-making processes, significant differences in member states’ procedural frameworks and administrative capabilities, differences in national methodologies, which explains the variety of data needs for the industry and the differing outcomes of evaluations, and the financial unsustainability of the current model.
The Commission sets out several options, ranging from the status quo to compulsory cooperation. The five scenarios are: (1) status quo, which would mean the third joint action would end in 2020; (2) voluntary cooperation beyond 2020; (3) cooperation through the collection, sharing and use of common tools and data, which would mean the introduction of a legal framework for HTA cooperation; (4) cooperation on producing joint relative effectiveness assessment (REA) reports and their uptake, which would mean that the assessment of non-clinical domains would remain under the responsibility of member states; (5) cooperation on the production of joint Full HTA reports and their uptake (cooperation on cost effectiveness), assessment of economic, ethical, legal and organisational domains.
The Commission is expected to launch a public consultation on these various scenarios in the course of this month. The roadmap can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/smart- regulation/roadmaps/docs/2016_sante_144_health_technology_assessments_en.pdf. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)