Summary:

Introduction: the current work, included in the Work Plan of the Spanish Network of Agencies for Assessing Health Technologies and Performance, was requested by the Comission on Provision, Insurance and Financing, dependent on the Interterritorial Board of the National Health System, with the purpose of developing an explicit priority setting methodology to support decision making regarding the technologies to be assessed for inclusion in the NHS service portfolio. The development of a comprehensive prioritisation system, based on criteria that are viewed to be strategic for resource allocation decision making, which cover the different aspects which could be relevant for establishing the added value for the health commnunity and society, is considered essential for identifying technologies that are likely to bring an important benefit to the healthcare system, avoiding dispersal of efforts in low impact technologies, whose assessment could be delayed or avoided, among other reasons because they present important uncertainties regarding the effectiveness or safety or they are not tailored to the characteristics of the Spanish NHS.

Objectives: the aim of this paper is to identify and analyse the processes and decision criteria used for priority setting internationally in order to establish a comprehensive set of strategic criteria and practical approaches that could serve as a starting point for the development of the Spanish prioritisation framework.

Methods: a systematic search of the literature was carried out in april 2015, without time limits, in the main biomedical electronic databases: PubMed, Embase, Centre for Reviews and Recommendations and Cochrane. To retrieve unpublished documents we completed the search with a manual review of the web pages of INAHTA and EUnetHTA agencies, scanned the “International Journal of Technology Assessment Health Care” and undertook a general search in Google for grey literature. Studies were selected by two independent evaluators based on set of predefined criteria. Systematic reviews and/or qualitative studies (interviews, surveys, expert consensus, etc) that aimed to
identify methods, prioritisation criteria o develop/propose general strategic/ operational frameworks for the selection of health priorities were included, as well as studies or organisational documents that provided information on the approaches used by different health technology assessment organisations for the selection of technologies to be assessed in order to support coverage decision making. Data of the studies that complied with eligibility criteria were analysed and synthesized qualitatively.

Result, discussion and conclusion: See pdf below.