Health technology assessment in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria

László Gulácsi, Alexandru Rotar, Maciej Niewada, Olga Löblová, Fanni Rencz, Guenka Petrova, Imre Boncz () and Niek Klazinga

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2014, vol. 15, issue 1, 13-25

Abstract: This paper describes and discusses the development and use of health technology assessment (HTA) in five Central and Eastern European countries (CEE): Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. It provides a general snapshot of HTA policies in the selected CEE countries to date by focusing on country case-studies based on document analysis and expert opinion. It offers an overview of similarities and differences between the individual CEE countries and discusses in detail the role of HTA by assessing its formalization and institutionalization, standardization of methodology, the use of HTA in practice and the degree of professionalization of HTA in the region. It finds that HTA has been to some extent implemented in all five countries studied, with methodologies in accordance with international standards, but that challenges remain when it comes to the role of HTA in health care decision-making as well as to human resource capacities of the countries. This paper suggests that coming years will show whether CEE countries develop adequate national analytical capacity to assess and appraise technologies in the context of local need and affordability, instead of using HTA as a mere administrative procedure to fulfill (inter)national requirements. Finally, suggestions are provided to strengthen HTA in CEE countries through cooperation, mutual learning, a common accreditation of HTA bodies and increased network building among CEE HTA experts. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Health technology assessment; Bulgaria; Czech Republic; Hungary; Poland; Romania; I 180 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10198-014-0590-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eujhec:v:15:y:2014:i:1:p:13-25

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-014-0590-8

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().