On the potential value of eHTA: a commentary on “Defining Early Health Technology Assessment: Building Consensus Using Delphi Technique”

The HTAi Health Technology Assessment (eHTA) Working Group's (WG) development of a consensus definition of early eHTA, as reported in Grutters et al. (1), represents a major step towards the establishment of eHTA as a distinct subdiscipline of HTA. In a global landscape in which growth in pharmaceutical spending is driven by the increasing number of high-cost specialty drugs (2-6), and where the cost of new entrants is not systematically associated with their clinical benefit (7;8), broader uptake of eHTA by pharmaceutical innovators offers a route to improving the value delivered by our collective investments in drug research and development (R&D). As we argue in this commentary, the WG's report provides a coherent framework within which to further define appropriate eHTA methods for specific use cases as well as eHTA's relationship to other decision-making tools currently used by health technology innovators and funders.