De NVTAG organiseert regelmatig symposia. Op deze pagina is informatie over eerdere symposia te vinden.

Broadening HTA for the healthcare package

NVTAG Spring symposium 2024

11 April 2024 | symposium

Policy makers are calling for a broadening of the use of health technology assessment (HTA), in the context of healthcare interventions other than pharmaceuticals. A more systematic consideration of other healthcare interventions (e.g. MedTech, mental health care) could help to ensure that care included in the basic benefit package sufficiently contributes to the goals of the healthcare sector. Are we able to do this? Are current HTA methods sufficient for use in all healthcare domains? Let’s dive in to this with speakers from the Zorginstituut and with an HTA expert panel with researchers experienced in HTA within various healthcare domains. What challenges do they face when conducting HTA research?

…. And also pitches from the nominees for the NVTAG prize!

Location: Cursus- en vergadercentrum Domstad | Koningsbergerstraat 9 | 3531 AJ Utrecht | https://www.accommodatiedomstad.nl/

The main language will be English, with possibly some contributions in Dutch.

You can register via: this link

Symposium 2023

legislation for Joint European Health Technology Assessment (EU-HTA).

12 October 2023 | symposium

You can find the slides of the presetations here: 

– Mentimeter_results

– Anne Willemsen ZIN

– Anke van Engen IQVIA

– Rick Vreman Roche

– Suzette Matthijsse Lumanity

Symposium: Where to go, if you don’t know?

Uncertainty in HTA desision making.

6 April 2023 | symposium

An important aspect of Health Technology Assessment is uncertainty, which complicates (reimbursement) decision making. During this symposium, speakers from different organizations will provide their views on how to deal with and communicate the uncertainty in recommendations and decisions.

The keynote address will be provided by Manuela Joore who has recently been appointed as chair of the scientific advisory committee at the Dutch Healthcare Institute (ZIN). Her lecture will be followed by Lonneke Timmers researcher, pharmacist and secretary of the scientific advisory committee. Teus van Barneveld an old NVTAG board member and currently the director of the Dutch Federation of Medical Specialists, will continue with a presentation about the inclusion of uncertainty in guidelines. Finally, Anoukh van Giessen will talk about how uncertainty is taken into account by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Last but not least, the NVTAG prize 2022 nominees will present their papers and you as an audience will have the opportunity to decide who will be the winner!

Hope to see you all on April 6th in Utrecht (Domstad)!
Seats are limited, hence ensure signing up via this link

Symposium: Fitting, or one-size-fits-all

24 November 2022 | symposium

On November 24, the NVTAG organized a symposium on the theme personalized healthcare titled “Fitting or One-Size-Fits-All”. After the participants were welcomed at the Domstad with some coffee and sandwiches Caroline van der Meijden opened the symposium. Three PhD candidates were selected to present their exciting research. Sajad Emamipour from the University of Groningen kicked off the program by giving an insight into how risk prediction models can be used to optimize screening strategies aimed at the detection of diabetic retinopathy or diabetic foot ulcers in diabetes patients. Next up was Carina Behr from the University of Twente. In her presentation, Carina showed her impressive effort in modelling screening for three important diseases (lung cancer, coronary heart disease, COPD) and the challenges faced during the project. The third PhD candidate providing a presentation was Xinyu Li from the University of Groningen. Xinyu showed how patient characteristics and clinical data can be combined to construct data-driven patient sub-groups instead of risk-driven sub-groups and how this clustering of patients can potentially be used to optimize the clinical management of diabetes patients. Both the organization and audience were impressed not only by the scientific work presented by the PhD candidates but also by the delivery of their message and lively discussion with the audience.

After the coffee break, dr. Joop de Langen from the Netherlands Cancer Institute opened the second part of the program. In his presentation, Joop showed the incredible progress made in lung cancer care over the past decades, and how the development of targeted therapy drugs and the discovery of targetable mutations aids the survival of patients. However, finding the oncogenic driver and mechanisms of resistance is key to treatment success. Examples taken from clinical practice provided a great insight into the value of these developments on an individual patient level. Joop showed how DNA from tumor tissue and ctDNA analysis results can be combined to get a more comprehensive overview of all oncogenic drivers and mechanisms of resistance driving tumor growth to improve treatment decisions. After this insight into the clinic, dr. Veerle Coupé took the stage to show the HTA community the challenges of evaluating these types of stratified care. While a lot of guidance is available on evaluating mainly drugs, the question arises, are these methods still valid when we want to evaluate biomarker tests or tests used to stratify treatments? By using an example of comparing large-panel testing to sequential testing in non-small cell lung cancer, Veerle showed that using large-panel testing resulted in a higher detection rate of druggable target mutations. And although large-panel testing resulted in lower test costs, the total treatment costs were higher, which was driven by the expensive treatments provided after the detection of a targetable mutation. The final speaker in the program was dr. Annuska Glas. In her presentation, Annuska made the audience aware of the great technological advancements made beginning with steam power driving the industrial revolution to computers and the use of AI in this current day and age. Currently, there are great advancements with the potential to alter current practices, such as AI-assisted evaluation of mammography images, which could potentially detect cancer more reliably but also lower the workload of physicians. While these advancements are very impressive, it puts a demand on the HTA field to evaluate these new technologies. Where current clinical trial designs might not be up to the task anymore, Annuska presented the I-SPY 2 trial design, in which a curable population is used together with an adaptable protocol and early endpoints.

The audience was full of questions already during the session, and although some questions were answered directly after the presentations, most of the questions were kept for the panel discussion. During the panel discussion, the speakers were joined by Wendy Maas and Prof. dr. Jan van Busschbach. Caroline moderated the interactive and lively panel discussion guided by questions from the audience.

Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) | Niek Mouter

2 december 2020 | webinar

Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) is a new stated preference method for the health economy that reflects the preferences of citizens for spending public funds by allowing them to choose between different policy options within a certain budget. In order to find out citizens’ preferences, participants join an online experiment in which a number of possible policy options including the attributes and effects of the options are given. A well-known example of a stated preference method is the Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). Both methods assume that welfare effects of policies can be derived from hypothetical choices (stated preference) that people make. In the DCE, people base their choices mainly on their private resources, such as their net income. This is also referred to as the private “willingness to pay approach”, or “consumer approach”. However, willingness to pay may not be the most appropriate approach for valuing governmental policy, because trade-offs that individuals make between private resources and private goods may differ from the way the same individuals feel that the government should make trade-offs between public resources and public goods (on their behalf). The use of the PVE method can address this problem.

Slides of the presentation can be found here as well as a short video about the PVE corona research (in Dutch). Finally, more information (in Dutch) can be found on this website: www.tudelft.nl/pve and https://kosteneffectiviteitvanpreventie.nl/participatieve-waarde-evaluatie-vaststellen-van-voorkeuren-van-burgers-voor-projecten-van-overheid.

VGE/NVTAG Symposium “De vele dimensies van gezondheid”

Over verder kijken dan je uitkomstmaat lang is.

10 september 2020 | online symposium

Donderdag 10 september 2020 vond het online NVTAG/VGE Symposium “De vele dimensies van gezondheid” plaats. Onderwerp was verder kijken dan je uitkomstmaat (lees: de QALY) lang is. Een belangrijk onderwerp, want hoewel de QALY in veel situaties voldoende houvast biedt, wringt deze algemene uitkomstmaat in andere situaties. Symposiumvoorzitter Maureen Rutten (EUR) opende de bijeenkomst, waarna de bestuursvoorzitters van de VGE (Richard van Kleef) en de NVTAG (Judith Bosmans) de deelnemers verwelkomden. Fijn om weer bij elkaar te zijn. Lees verder>>