HSRU's David Cooper attended HTAi2019 last month with our HERU colleague Elisabet Jacobsen.
The 16th Health Technology Assessment International conference took place in Cologne, Germany from 15th to 19th June. The conference started with workshops on the Saturday and Sunday with workshops ranging from introduction to health technology assessment to best practices for leveraging artificial intelligence in systematic literature reviews and from appraising treatments for rare diseases to automation tools for advancing information retrieval.
The title of the conference was “HTA Beyond 2020: Ready For The New Decade”. The three plenary sessions were:
- One Size Fits All? Will joint international assessments improve or hinder HTA?
- Era of digital health.
- Need for smart capability building.
They were supported by a program of oral sessions (including a presentation on probabilistic incorporation of structural uncertainty in models by Elisabet Jacobsen from HERU), panel sessions, poster sessions, vignettes and symposia.
The general theme throughout the conference was moving HTA beyond considering the patient solely as a recipient of healthcare and how they can be a part of the process. Challenges in obtaining consensus in HTA and in developing common terms and methodology for a more unified process were also discussed. In addition the increase in the amount of available data, the providers of this data and the different types of available data were considered as both an opportunity and a challenge for the next decade and beyond.