USING EXPERT OPINION IN HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT: A GUIDELINE REVIEW.

Objectives: External experts can be consulted at different stages of an HTA. When using vague information sources, it is particularly important to plan, analyze, and report the information processing in a standardized and transparent way. Our objective was to search and analyze recommendations regarding where and how to include expert data in HTA.

Cost of clinical events in health economic evaluations in Germany: a systematic review.

Guidance from the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) on cost estimation in cost-benefit assessments in Germany acknowledges the need for standardization of costing methodology. The objective of this review was to assess current methods for deriving clinical event costs in German economic evaluations. A systematic literature search of 24 databases (including MEDLINE, BIOSIS, the Cochrane Library and Embase) identified articles, published between January 2005 and October 2009, which reported cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analyses.

Identification of areas of functioning and disability addressed in inflammatory bowel disease-specific patient reported outcome measures.

Background And Aims: Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) make it possible to assess health-status problems from the perspective of persons suffering from a disease. The objective of the paper is to examine and compare the contents of PROMs related to IBD based on the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as the frame of reference.

Methods: A systematic literature review (1999-2009) in the databases Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL and CENTRAL was performed to select IBD-specific PROMs.