Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produces various types of guidance. This includes Technology Appraisals (mandatory guidance for the National Health Service [NHS] to make funding available for cost-effective interventions) and advisory guideline recommendations (advice on choice of effective and cost-effective treatment options). NICE is bringing its guidance together through a whole lifecycle approach with the objectives of improve usability to patients and practitioners, while providing value for money for the NHS.
METHODS: To describe the processes, methods, legal and logistical differences across NICE's array of guidance products, and to explore how the barriers these differences represent to producing integrated guidance, including the need for re-evaulation to reflect changes in evidence, practice, safety and costs over time, as well as the realities of balancing the goals of health policy with industrial policy.
RESULTS: To present a new approach that integrates and unifies methods and processes for health technology assessment and guideline development that allows the update of guidance across their lifecycle, so that they remain useful and usable, while still identifying cost-effective options.
CONCLUSIONS: Bringing together NICE's guidance involves more than just aligning its methods and processes, but requires a hybrid approach that allows input from manufactures, clinical experts and patients, while reflecting changes in evidence, practice, safety and costs over time as part of their re-evaluation, to improve their usability, support uptake, and enhance patient outcomes, while optimising NHS resources.