Stakeholder engagement in health technology assessment: a scoping review protocol

<ns3:p>Introduction Stakeholder engagement in the multidisciplinary process of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) ensures consideration of different perspectives and relevant issues during the HTA process. Despite being considered good practice to engage stakeholders in HTA, there is a lack of standardised methods and limited guidance on how to incorporate stakeholder engagement in the HTA process. This scoping review aims to identify the current practices for stakeholder engagement in HTA internationally. Methods JBI methodology for scoping reviews will be followed and the final review will be reported in accordance with PRISMA-ScR checklist. This scoping review will include both peer review published literature as well as grey literature. This will include guidance documents and webpages describing stakeholder engagement processes in HTA, as well as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method peer review publications describing and evaluating stakeholder engagement. The search strategy will be developed by a medical librarian using two concepts: “stakeholder engagement” and “health technology assessment”. Two researchers will independently screen, select, and chart data from the identified documents. The quantitative data will be described descriptively while the qualitative data will be analysed using a basic content analysis and reported narratively. Conclusion This scoping review will identify current practices for stakeholder engagement in the HTA process internationally. The review findings will be used to inform updates to the national guideline for stakeholder engagement for HTA in Ireland and can also be used to develop future guidance.</ns3:p>