OBJECTIVES: Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is claimed to be the aid for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) based decision making. Transparent commitment of multi-disciplinary stakeholders is essential to attain public confidence in healthcare decision making. In current deliberative process commitment of stakeholders is not transparent. This research aims to propose a prioritization approach for MCDM applications in HTA by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

METHODS: Domains defined in HTA Core Model^® of EUnetHTA are selected as nine criteria for MCDM application in HTA. The commitment of decision makers in prioritization of nine criteria is provided by using Saaty rating scale. The decision making group consists of nephrologists, pharmacologists, and health economists in HTA study on “The Role of Peritoneal Dialysis” by Turkish Ministry of Health are asked to define the relative importance of criteria by pairwise comparisons via an online survey. The weights of criteria are determined by applying AHP to survey results.

RESULTS: The weights for HTA Core Model^® domains by AHP are found to be 0.049 for Health problem and its current use of the technology, 0.036 for Description and technical characteristics of technology, 0.188 for Safety, 0.224 Clinical effectiveness, 0.073 for Costs and economic evaluation, 0.117 for Ethical analysis, 0.077 for Organizational aspects, 0.102 for Social aspects, and 0.132 for Legal aspects. The consistency ratio is 0.0302.

CONCLUSIONS: The decision making process in any healthcare systems is a complex set of pragmatic interactions among many stakeholders. With the proposed model stakeholder participation in criteria prioritization is provided. Clinical effectiveness domain is found to have the highest weight followed by Safety. Cost and economic evaluation domain assigned to have lower weight. This shows that decision makers in this specific survey gives more importance on treatment effectiveness, patient safety, and societal aspects while deciding on best treatment alternative in dialysis.