Should health technology assessment be more patient centric? If so, how?

Excerpt

Health technology assessment (HTA) methods and processes have been criticized for not being sufficiently ‘patient centric’. For example, Perfetto [1] argued that a proposed approach for assessing the value of health care interventions had not sufficiently incorporated a patient perspective and suggested that it represented a ‘missed opportunity’. A similar point was made about the other ‘value assessment frameworks’ developed recently in the United States [2]. In addition, Slejko et al. [3] proposed some key elements of a ‘patient informed’ reference case for conducting economic evaluations, which would supplement reference cases outlined by groups such as the second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine [4], by including consideration of elements such as convenience in receiving care, effects on the patient’s family, examination of whether quality of life instruments include the most relevant domains and a model structure for the economic evaluation that adequately reflects the patient’s journey through the various treatment options. …