What the European Union can Teach the US About Health Technology Assessment Harmonization

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) in the US is a convoluted piecemeal process where each payer performs their own assessments without coordinating with one another, wasting effort and raising costs. In the EU, however, government bodies are responsible for HTA and release pricing and coverage recommendations. While this approach has fewer of the issues plaguing their US counterparts, EU citizens still face uneven barriers to access.

According to a recent article in Health Affairs, “the European Union has been engaged in a 20-year process of harmonization, with the hope of moving towards a single process and outcome for each innovative therapy. This effort has run into fiercely held opinions on methods and a jealous regard for local prerogatives. The voluntary harmonization initiative, dubbed EUnetHTA, produced a framework (i.e., HTA Core Model) and some joint assessments for individual drugs, but never achieved standardization. This year the European Union put the voluntary effort out of its misery and mandated a new approach.”

Learn more about the EU’s new HTA approach by clicking here.

(Source: Health Affairs, December 2^nd, 2021)