THE ETHICAL DOMAIN IN HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT (HTA): BASICS, APPROACHES AND ISSUES

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a multidisciplinary process that collect information about the medical, economic, organizational, social, legal and ethical issues related to the use of a certain health technology in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, manner. Its main purpose is to support health care decision-makers. From the conception of HTA in the 1970s, it has been argued that the ethical domain is a constitutive part of HTA and that value judgments are inherent in the whole process of HTA. Specifically, ethical domain aims at analyzing both the ethical questions that a given technology raises when it is put into use/disinvestment and the ethical issues that the HTA process itself raises. Despite almost 40 years with similar considerations, ethics has not so frequently been part of HTA reports. The paper provides an overview of the ethical domain within the HTA processes and the experience of the Institute of Bioethics and Medical Humanities of the Universita`Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.