Adopt Health Technology Assessment at Hospital

EPF has recently joined the Advisory Board of a new European project on HTA: AdHopHTA - Adopting Hospital Based Health Technology Assessment (HTA). It aims at strengthening the use and impact of high quality HTA-results in hospital settings. Different tools will be developed to support this objective.

Several hospital based HTA initiatives have lately emerged in Europe. However they have never been examined systematically. Small hospital-based HTA-units produce valuable knowledge that is not easily accessible or transferrable to other EU hospitals, also because of a lack of coordination between them.

These are the issues that AdHopHTA (2012-2015) will address, making available pragmatic knowledge and tools to facilitate adoption of hospital based HTA-initiatives. The final outputs of the project will be a handbook on best practices for hospital based HTA, a deployment toolkit and a (pilot) repository on hospital based HTA-products. This will ultimately facilitate the start of new hospital based HTA-programmes and improve the quality and efficiency of already existing ones.

EPF has accepted to join the Advisory Board to ensure patients perspective is considered and strengthened during the project lifecycle. We will also make policy recommendations to guarantee a patient-based approach in transferring lessons learnt and best practices to other hospitals. Finally this project will enable us to understand better how the decision making process for adopting innovation works at hospital level and use this knowledge for our own development in HTA research.

For more information, please contact Laura Sampietro-Colom (lsampiet@clinic.ub.es), Hospital Clinic Barcelona