OBJECTIVES: Collaboration can enable Health Technology Assessment (HTA) organisations to work more efficiently making better use of their resources, sharing expertise and improving the quality of their work. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 5-year strategy places increased collaboration as a key development in the changing landscape in which NICE operates. This presentation describes work to support HTA collaboration at NICE and the outcomes of the work.

METHODS: To support international collaboration NICE has recently put in place mechanisms to record and coordinate its international activity and to support teams to engage in international collaboration.

RESULTS: NICE has over 150 active international partnerships across its programmes in countries around the world. Established areas of collaboration are in science and methods development, scientific advice and evidence generation. HTA collaboration in the areas of horizon scanning, topic identification and assessment and evaluation are less established, but there is ongoing activity to explore the potential opportunities and challenges. Challenges to collaborate arise from the jurisdiction specific nature of HTA and the procedural and methodological restrictions that can affect how flexible the agency is in the timelines and approach that can be adopted.

CONCLUSIONS: Collaboration in the areas of science and methods, scientific advice and evidence generation can be easier to implement than collaboration in assessment and evaluation. This is because it is often less time sensitive and there is more flexibility in the approach that can be adopted. To overcome the challenges in setting up collaboration there is a need to identify the value of collaboration early on in a project and to embed it into projects during the planning stages. Collaboration approaches needs to be flexible with a focus on matching the right collaborator to the right project.