Giving Patients a Meaningful Voice in European Health Technology Assessments: The Role of Health Preference Research

Excerpt

Throughout Europe, formal health technology assessments (HTAs) are increasingly being required for regulatory decision making. Although the institutional and legal contexts for HTA vary by country, HTA typically involves evaluations of causal evidence and requires assessing tradeoffs among multiple clinical trial endpoints and multiple, often conflicting objectives. Although the assessment requires evaluating the quantity and quality of evidence, decision makers do apply values at some point that attach weights to multiple decision criteria from multiple perspectives. Thus, the outcomes of decision processes depend both on their identified endpoints and on the relative importance attached to the decision criteria (i.e., the decision weights) [1]. …