French HTA and appropriateness of care: Beyond reimbursement

Heath Technology Assessment (HTA) is mainly used for reimbursement/disinvestment and access to innovation purposes. In addition, HTA is a useful tool to promote appropriateness of care, as it describes the updated level of validation of assessed health technologies. Thus, several tools (proper use sheets, drug-indexed decision support systems, supervision of practices or use) based on HTA are developed to promote the appropriateness of use of drugs, medical devices or diagnostic and therapeutic procedures among healthcare professionals.

HTA can also support the development and the update of clinical practice guidelines (CPG) which are the main tool of clinical practice improvement. In addition, HTA can increase CPG implementation through reimbursement of recommended health technologies. Therefore, HTA and CPGs can be perfectly articulated to enable synergistic synchronic or asynchronic action to improve the relevance of care by enabling more dynamic and efficient actions, particularly in terms of robustness and updating.

However, HTA shares with CPGs the same difficulties of implementation in the field. To face them, whatever the implementation strategy defined, it requires a multifaceted approach involving iterative communication and the involvement of healthcare professionals, patients and stakeholders, both upstream and downstream of the HTA stages.