Background: Orphan medicinal products are designed to diagnose or treat rare diseases that are serious, life threatening or chronically debilitating and that affect 50 or fewer people in every 100 000 in the EU. In Belgium, the Drug Reimbursement Committee (DRC) evaluates reimbursement...

Background: Attempts to improve the acceptability of resource allocation decisions around new health technologies have spanned many years, fields and disciplines. Various theories of decision making have been tested and methods piloted, but, despite their availability, evidence of sustained...

Background: Market authorization does not guarantee patient access to any given drug. This is particularly true for costly orphan drugs because access depends primarily on co-payments, reimbursement policies and prices. The objective of this article is to identify differences in the availability...

Background and Objective:Background and Objective: The increasing cost of chemotherapy is placing greater pressures on limited healthcare budgets. A potentially important, but often overlooked, aspect of chemotherapy is the cost associated with administration. This study aims to develop a better...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) invited the manufacturer of denosumab (Amgen Inc., UK) to submit evidence for the clinical and cost effectiveness of denosumab for the prevention of fragility fractures in post-menopausal women, as part of the Institute's single...

All healthcare systems routinely make resource allocation decisions that trade off potential health gains to different patient populations. However, when such trade-offs relate to the introduction of new, promising health technologies, perceived 'winners' and 'losers' are more apparent. In...

Value of information (VOI) methods have been proposed as a systematic approach to inform optimal research design and prioritization. Four related questions arise that VOI methods could address. (i) Is further research for a health technology assessment (HTA) potentially worthwhile? (ii) Is the...