Although social and health policy is a responsibility of Member States, there is an increasing perception that there is an opportunity for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of health technology procurement by implementing cross-country collaboration in a range of activities, including Health Technology Assessment (HTA).

 

This certainly applies to the field of methodological development, but also to that of empirical and applied studies. In some cases (e.g. RCTs and other clinical studies) the results of a specific study can be almost directly applied to other settings, but in the case of economic evaluations, a number of aspects must be customised to country-specific circumstances to attain external validity.

 

Recent years have also seen significant changes: data on costs and health outcomes are now available from an increasing range of sources underscoring the need for better data integration and evidence synthesis, as well as strengthening of data generation processes for economic evaluations and improvement in methodological quality.

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Based on these challenges, the IMPACT HTA project has three key objectives:
 

Understanding variations

Through methodological improvements, to contribute to the understanding of variations in costs and health outcomes within and across countries the state-of-the-art (best practices) of economic evaluation of new technologies.

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Assisting decision-making

Develop and disseminate a number of innovative methodologies, toolkits and processes in areas such as extrapolation from RCT data, costing, outcomes measurement, value assessment of medical technologies, real world evidence, to aid decision-making and improve efficiency in resource allocation.
 

Facilitating collaboration

Develop and disseminate tools to facilitate EU-wide cross-country collaboration across Member State governments, HTA agencies, professionals and the broader stakeholder community.

 

By means of conceptual and extensive empirical research, IMPACT HTA places strong emphasis on methodological improvements and the production of tangible deliverables and toolkits that are immediately actionable by health care decision-makers and HTA agencies. The project will address a number of significant and policy-relevant gaps in the conduct of economic evaluations and selected performance measurement activities by:
 

• Combining academic excellence in a number of fields (health policy, health economics, macroeconomics, behavioural economics and science, hospital economics and management, health care quality of life);
   

• Collecting primary data on patient preferences; and
   

• Explicitly incorporating the views, perspectives and needs of national decision-makers and HTA bodies, who are included as consortium members or/and Scientific Advisory Board members.