EU regulation on Health Technology Assessment: recommendations for the trilogue negotiations

To make people healthier, new medicines should work better than the treatments already available. But this is not always the case. The same happens with medical devices. Health Technology Assessment (HTA) identifies to which extent new health technologies are of added value, and helps governments decide which should be reimbursed and at what price. Therefore, HTA can help ensure better value for money for public health systems and consumers.

Trilogue recommendations include: 

• Member States must make use of the joint clinical reports

• Consumers must have their say

• Joint clinical assessments should be adopted by consensus or simple majority

• A progressive and ambitious timeline for the assessment of pharmaceutical products

• New medicines must be compared with standard of care, not placebos

• Orphan medicines should be assessed with the same rigour