Unlocking Ethics in Health Technology Assessment: Exploring Practice and Impact

PURPOSE: Explicit attention to ethical considerations is increasingly being recognized as integral to Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and health care decision-making. The increasing complexity of the health care landscape is making the importance of ethical considerations even more apparent, as HTA organizations and decision-makers are faced with the need to identify innovative opportunities to assess, appraise, and harness the total value of health technologies across the life cycle. Despite this growing recognition of the importance of ethics in HTA, capacity remains limited in how to apply, understand, and leverage key ethical considerations within the practices and methodologies of HTA. This workshop will introduce participants to the role of ethics in HTA, and outline approaches to meaningfully consider ethics to best support HTA practice and health systems decision-making. DESCRIPTION: Workshop participants will learn the history, scope, rationale, purpose and methods for the inclusion of ethical considerations in HTA, as well as considerations related to ethics in the conduct of HTA itself (15 min.). Participants will be introduced to a framework for ethics analysis developed by Canada’s Drug Agency, and participate in brief break-out group discussions to apply their learnings to ethics analyses in select case examples, including a CAR-T therapy, drug for a rare disease, and oncology medical device (25 min.). Participants will have a chance to discuss their findings, applicability of ethics analysis to their own work, and an opportunity to engage with experts in the field (20 min.). Participants will leave this workshop with a toolkit of methods, strategies, practices and resources to better understand, leverage, and learn from ethical considerations in their own practice, and in the broader, changing health care landscape.