Health technology assessment

The General Director of Lombardy Healthcare released a decree no. 916 of 29.1.2020. The decree contains several important notices, the most important one being that the “Rules of the regional HTA commission” was published. In the first half of February 2020, it was published on the website of the regional HTA program of the Lombardy region.

On January 31, 2020, the non-statutory HTA body, Swiss Medical Board, published the results of the report in which they compared the surgical and non-surgical treatment of rotator cuff tears. Though the surgery is more effective, the traditional treatment demonstrated better cost-benefit results. Thus, the Swiss Medical Board recommends the rotator cuff surgery with limitations.

In January 2020, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published only three new interventional procedure guidance (for reducing the risk of transmission of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) from surgical instruments used for interventional procedures on high-risk tissues, fetoscopic and open prenatal repair for open neural tube defects in the fetus).

In late January 2020, the network of European HTA agencies, EUnetHTA, announced the final plan of the project OTCA21 “Hypoglossal nerve stimulation systems for treatment of obstructive sleep apnoea.”

The HTA unit of the Lombardy region opens the possibility for the public to comment on the health technologies which are in the assessment phase. The call is open until February 28, 2020.

Norway established in 2013 a framework “New Method” for the introduction of innovations into the health care system through either a national or hospital-based health technology assessment. In this framework, all innovations should undergo HTA before being funded. In January 2020, four new mini-HTA projects of medical technologies were launched in Norway: robotic-assisted procedures, ear reconstruction, continuous electroencephalography, among others.

In December 2019, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health released an HTA report regarding the effectiveness of uterine fibroids treatment commissioned by the Centre for joint decision-making to summarize the findings regarding this method. Embolization probably reduces the time that is needed to get back to the activity in comparison to myomectomy and hysterectomy.

In early January 2020, the network of European HTA agencies, EUnetHTA, announced the final plan of the project OTCA24 “The 24-hour blood pressure measurement device Mobil-O-Graph® with the built-in pulse wave velocity algorithm ARCSolver® to measure arterial stiffness for the optimization of hypertension treatment and assessment of cardiovascular risk”.

With a regional decree of December 18, 2019, Tuscany Regional Healthcare has published assessments of thirteen medical devices belonging to various therapeutic areas.

In December 2019, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published one new interventional procedure guidance (for balloon dilation for chronic eustachian tube dysfunction), one new medical technologies guidance (for gammaCore for cluster headache), and five new MedTech innovation briefings (for Optowire for measuring fractional flow reserve, eXroid for internal hemorrhoids, and others).

In mid-November 2019, the report of the project OTCA20, titled “Prophylactic or therapeutic use of endoanchoring systems in endovascular aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR/TEVAR)” was published on the website of the European Network for HTA (EUnetHTA).

In early November 2019, the report of the project OTCA18, titled “Regional hyperthermia for high-risk soft tissue sarcoma treatment” was published on the website of the European Network for HTA (EUnetHTA).