Introduction: the following project, which has being developed as part of the 2015-2017 Working Plan of the Spanish Agencies Health Technology Assessment Network (RedETS), has been requested by the Spanish Provision, Coverage, and Financing Commission, which depends on the Inter-territorial Council of the National Health System (NHS). This project is focused on improving the procedure for prioritising technologies to be assessed by RedETS. The development of a systematic procedure that defines the steps, stages, and information requirements for the identification and prioritisation of technologies responds to the need to improve the objectivity, transparency, and acceptability of the selection process. Although different prioritisation models have been proposed in order to deal with topic selection, we have considered adapting the PriTec tool (http://www.pritectools.es/) for the purpose of implementing the prioritisation process at the national level. This automatic web tool makes it possible to rank different technologies based on the score given to a set of previously weighted criteria, distributed by domains.

 Aims: To develop a tool that helps the Provision, Coverage, and Financing Commission to select and prioritise, in a systematic and objective way, the different healthcare technologies to be assessed by RedETS for the purpose of supporting decision making regarding their inclusion/exclusion or modification of conditions of use in the common service portfolio of the National Health System. The specific aims are: 1) to review the scientific literature in order to identify the prioritisation criteria and processes used to select healthcare priorities at national/international level, 2) to develop a prioritisation tool, based on the PriTec application, which makes it possible to classify and rank different technologies based on a series of commonly accepted criteria, which have been weighted by a multidisciplinary team of experts composed of managers from the macro, meso and micro level , clinicians, and patients’ representatives, and 3) evaluate the use and application of the PriTec tool within the real context of prioritisation of the working plan of the Agency Network (RedETS).

Methods, results, discussion and conclussions: See pdf below