Umeå universitets logga

One challenge for health care is that resources are limited. With a rising demand for care and the pace of technological innovations, priority setting has become more important than ever for decision-makers. This study describes Health Technology Assessment (HTA) as a systematic evaluation of products based as well as methods based medical technologies. HTA are performed in HTA-organizations. HTA is a process and a knowledge basis used in priority setting when decision-makers prioritize between medical technologies within health care. A priority setting that follows the framework Accountability for Reasonableness (A4R) be a fair process. The main objective of this thesis is to identify and map the existing regional HTA-organizations in Sweden and to map the priority setting process. Additionally, seek to analyse the HTA-production and the priority setting decision process of medical technologies through the framework A4R. Key informant interviews were conducted, and relevant documents were reviewed. The key informants were selected by their involvement or knowledge in the priority setting process. The results indicate that both the HTA-organizations and the priority setting processes are structured differently in different regions. This implies that each region/county council have different preconditions and should within themselves decide how to best form an HTA-organization. The processes of HTA-production meet the A4R conditions and can, therefore, be judged to be fair. The priority setting in selected regions/county council does not fully meet the A4R conditions and, according to the framework, cannot consider to be fair.