Introduction
In a time when the accountability for public expenditures is at a zenith and public funders are evaluating the effectiveness or impact of the programs and services they fund ñ it was thought opportune to examine evaluations conducted of HTA agencies with a view to informing why and how the evaluations were conducted and what changes resulted from the evaluations.
To date no comprehensive systematic review or analysis has been conducted of the evaluations done of health technology assessment (HTA) agencies around the world. We expect that evaluations or reviews of HTA agencies are conducted for many different reasons. HTA is a reasonably young endeavour and reviews are usually used as a continuous improvement or accountability initiative to identify ways to improve practice or to determine whether the funding agency is receiving value from the expenditure. The increased rapidity of innovation and diffusion of technologies in contemporary societies is, on the one hand, increasing the demand for health technology assessments and, on the other hand, creating a need to demonstrate that the outcomes or impact of HTA products are relevant to policy and decision makers, as well as practitioners.
The authors of this study collected and reviewed the external evaluations conducted of members of the International Network of Agencies for Technology Assessment (INAHTA) between the years 1994 to 2004. In April 2005 there were 39 INAHTA member agencies in 21 countries.
The objectives of this review were:
- To propose a generic evaluation framework for HTA agencies to strengthen their evaluation capacity.
- To conduct a review of HTA agencies to understand what aspects of HTA agencies have been evaluated, approaches/methods used, outcomes of the evaluations and to understand what was learned through these evaluations that could guide HTA agencies to best serve their mandate.