Health technology assessment to inform allocation of healthcare resources

Abstract

 Rising healthcare costs are increasingly associated with multiple factors, such as continuous innovation, rapid generation and incremental improvement of medical technologies, changes in societal values and increases in public expectations, leading to a difficult decision-making environment for investment in technologies. Formal assessment of health technologies could aid decisions about health resource allocation for the management of health technology (such as drugs and devices). Additionally, multiple criteria, such as societal values and patient preferences, should be included in the decision-making process of policy-makers. One way to include these criteria is to use multi-criteria decision analysis to support the assessment of health technologies, as it is deemed an efficient and effective methodology that has a sustainable impact on population health.