LSE leads consortium for new IMPACT Health Technology Assessment project

LSE Health at the London School of Economics and Political Science is leading a consortium of 15 institutional partners awarded $4.59 million Euros by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for a new 3-year project entitled IMPACT HTA (Health Technology Assessment), commencing in January 2018.

The consortium combines geographical and disciplinary diversity with academic rigor and policy relevance emphasized by the members' experience in linking research to policy; the consortium comprises the following institutions: 1) The London School of Economics and Political Science - LSE Health (LSE), UK (coordinator and principal investigator); 2) The Andalusian School of Public Health (EASP), Spain; 3) University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Spain; 4) Universitaet Bielefeld (UNIBI), Germany; 5) National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), UK; 6) Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Portugal; 7) Paris School of Economics (PSE), France; 8) Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (UCSC), Italy; 9) Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), France; 10) Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Italy; 11) Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi (UB), Italy; 12) University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), UK; 13) Inštitut za Ekonomska Raziskovanja (IER), Slovenia; 14) Agencja Oceny Technologii Medycznych i Taryfikacji (AOTMiT), Poland; 15) Tandvårds- och läkemedelsförmånsverket (TLV), Sweden.

IMPACT-HTA will place strong emphasis on methodological improvements in the conduct of HTA and will aim at producing tangible deliverables and toolkits that are immediately actionable by health care decision-makers and HTA agencies. Specifically, the overall objectives of IMPACT-HTA are:

• To contribute 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;
• To develop and disseminate innovative methodologies, toolkits and processes aiming to aid decision-making and improve efficiency in resource allocation in a number of areas including: extrapolation from RCT data; the development of a common and comparable dataset on health and social care costs across EU countries; quality of life measurement with emphasis on patient preference elicitation; methods of value assessment of medical technologies, including multi-criteria decision analysis; and how non-randomised studies can inform health economic evaluations; and
• To develop and disseminate tools facilitating EU-wide collaboration across Member State governments, HTA agencies, health care professionals, patients and the broader stakeholder community.

The thematic areas of focus of IMPACT-HTA will include:

• The use of randomized controlled trial (RCT) and observational/registry data in economic evaluation;
• The development of a costing methodology and a creation of a core dataset of (health and social care) costs for facilitating cross border comparisons in economic evaluation;
• Capturing health preferences across different patient diagnoses using the EQ-5D-5L;
• The analysis and interpretation of non-randomised studies to inform health economic evaluation;
• The use of multi-criteria value methods and their relevance for HTA decision-making;
• Economic evaluation methods for hospital-based assessments;
• Measuring the fiscal impact of new healthcare interventions and incorporating this into HTA processes; and
• HTA appraisal for orphan medicinal products.