Room for improvement of HTA process to accelerate medicines access

A new report on Health Technology Assessment (HTA) processes published today highlights significant areas for improvement in order to accelerate patients’ access to new technologies and innovative medicines, and to make the most of tight public budgets. The study, jointly commissioned by the pharma and biotech trade groups EFPIA, EuropaBio, Medicines Australia and PhRMA, compares the HTA processes and outputs against best practice principles.

In particular the report shows that the link between assessments and access decisions could be improved. One of the crucial roles of HTA is to improve access to innovative treatments and medicines. However, the report found little evidence that current HTA processes make a difference in terms of speeding up access to medicines for patients or that HTA resulted in better rewards for medicines with higher therapeutic value.