LSE Health has been awarded €4.6 million by the European Commission to develop innovative ways of assessing the costs and benefits of medical technologies to help decision-makers improve efficiency in resource allocation. LSE Health economics and policy experts are leading a consortium of 15 European partners, including academic institutions and national HTA (health technology assessment) agencies, under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for a 3-year project, IMPACT-HTA.
The project contributes to the understanding of variations in costs and health outcomes within and across countries, the rationale and criteria for decision-making across different settings as well as the factors and preferences that shape HTA recommendations.
The research focuses on a number of areas including: combination of randomized clinical trials with real world data; the development of a common and comparable dataset on health and social care costs across EU countries; quality of life measurement using patient preferences elicitation; use of non-randomised studies to inform health economic evaluations; HTA methods for hospitals-based assessment, measuring fiscal impact, and appraisal for orphan medicinal products, including multi-criteria value methods for decision-making.
The developed tools will facilitate EU-wide collaboration across Member State governments, HTA agencies, health care professionals, patients and the broader stakeholder community.
This is the second major European Commission grant in the area of HTA for the LSE Health research group, following on from the successful completion of the Advance-HTA project from 2012-2015.
Panos Kanavos, Deputy Director of LSE Health and Principal Investigator of IMPACT-HTA, commented: “This is a tremendous opportunity to develop new tools in HTA that will ultimately aid resource allocation as well as foster collaboration between the science and the policy communities across Europe.”