USC Health Policy Center Posts White Paper on Health Tech Assessment

USC has an active health policy center (website here) and has just released a white paper on the state of health technology assessment (HTA) in the US.

• See the press release and summary here.
• See the 11-page white paper here.
• See an essay about the project by health expert Jason Shafrin, online here.

Quoting from Shafrin's  summary, the USC white paper has six recommendations - 

1. Continue to encourage private HTA [BQ: e.g. Evidence Street, Hayes, others]
2. Establish a nationally funded Institute for HTA, I-HTA
3. Include economic evaluations in the reports
4. Include new and old devices, both specific tech's and "health policy interventions"
5. Allow stakeholder engagement
6. Have US policies that encourage such HTAs to "impact" policy-making

The new USC paper was issued February 9, by Lakdawalla et al.  

There's more history on the same topic at USC.  See a February 2020 USC policy center article here, which itself included a 45-page 2019 USC white paper on the history of US HTA, here.

There's also an updated, 72-page "Office of Technology Assessment" white paper produced as recently as April 2020 by the Congressional Research Service - find it here.  

Journal articles.  You can also find an open-access 28-page 2014 academic article by Wong at Biotechnology Law Report on the history of HTA in the US, here.   See also a 53-page academic article on "the role of the federal government in comparative effectiveness research," in Annals of Health Law in 2012 by Francis, here, open access here.  Even further back, see a 2003 open access article by Stevens et al. at J Public Health, 2003 (here).

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There's a wealth of information on efforts toward HTA harmonization in Europe; for one entry point, see a 2018 white paper here.