This article, published in the Ocotber 2010 issue of PharmacoEconomics, examines health technology assessments (HTA) in Canada, Sweden, Scotland, The Netherlands and Australia and identifies seven shared characteristics that potentially serve as insights for development of CER in the United States. 

Among the study’s key conclusions:

• CER should be responsive to stakeholder needs by minimizing the time to make assessments, maximizing transparency, and using a process that is fair and is conducted with universally agreed-upon standards.
• Unlike other countries in which the HTA process assesses benefits to inform a single payer, the diverse multi-payer system in the U.S. suggests that national efforts here are best focused on generating comparative effectiveness evidence.
• Using CER to identify therapeutic benefit among specific demographic groups (e.g., the elderly or racial and ethnic minorities) and individuals with specific genetic characteristics, disabilities, or multiple conditions may be difficult to achieve because few randomized trials can really detect differences, and thus such studies are rare.

Due to copyright issues, the article must be downloaded from the PharmacoEconomics website.