Finally arrived in downtown Milan after a long train ride on the so-called Malpensa Express. This rainy afternoon in Milan saw the second workshop of the European Health Technology Institute for Socio-Economic Research(EHTI) at beautiful Bocconi campus discussing the road to harmonisation of health technology assessment (HTA) in Europe.
Rosanna Tarricone Executive Director of the EHTI provided an overview of the current state of play of research in Health Technology Assessment (HTA), needs for future research and potential hurdles that would need to be overcome to achieve a harmonization of HTA across Europe. Her main message to the audience might be perceived as quite strong but I believe it’s the right thing to do. She stressed the fact that harmonization of HTA in Europe currently would not only be difficult to achieve but even dangerous for health systems given the level of evidence available about its implications.
Although an obvious thing to do for so many things of our daily lives “think before you act” does not always seem an obvious choice for policy development in Europe. Let’s see where this dialogue takes us next, the over 60 participants certainly showed it’s a topic of interest not only to industry but also to hospitals, policy-makers and academia.