The Thai healthcare system faces pressure to fund high-cost new branded pharmaceuticals. Paying more may encourage innovation with positive implications for future population health, but it also means less money is available to fund other healthcare with negative implications for current population health. Recent work in the UK estimated, for the f

(Reuters) – Pharmaceutical companies selling drugs in parts of the San Francisco Bay area would be required to submit plans for incinerating or safely disposing of unused medication under a plan advanced by county officials this week.The measure, billed by supporters as the first of its kind in the

What definition of HTA do you subscribe to?Mark: HTA is a term that is used quite loosely. It seems that the formal definition is to provide an assessment of medical technologies using different perspectives including clinical, economic, ethical and technical. But I think the meaning that it has dev

WASHINGTON — One of the few bills moving through Congress with bipartisan support this spring would speed government approval of lower-cost generic copies of brand-name drugs. But one company, with help from an influential former congressman, is lobbying to protect its most lucrative brand-name prod

New drugs for breast cancer and multiple myeloma won approval from the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, expanding options for patients in advanced stages of those diseases.The breast cancer drug, Afinitor from Novartis, seems to expand the time that endocrine therapy can keep the disease in c

The company said the drug sovaprevir, when given along with the standard therapy of pegylated interferon and ribavirin, showed no detectable virus level in a majority of patients four weeks after the end of the treatment period.Of the 39 patients who received 12 weeks of additional standard therapy

(Reuters) – U.S. antitrust officials have approved Spectrum Pharmaceuticals’ purchase of cancer drugmaker Allos Therapeutics, a $206 million deal aimed at giving Spectrum access to the Allos anti-cancer drug Folotyn.The Federal Trade Commission posted letters on its web site sent to lawyers for Allo

The abundance of various innovations in healthcare (pharmaceuticals, medical devices, interventions, individual and community health promotion and disease prevention as well as a social health policy) have been continuously used in the healthcare system, resulting in a higher demand for resources and budgets in disease prevention and healthcare. Th

The Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP) was established in 2007 as a non-profit organization. Its main responsibility is to assess health interventions and technology assessment with the coverage of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, interventions, individual and community health promotions and disease prevention, as well a

An aim of this study is to describe quantitatively and qualitatively progression and findings from the HTA topic selection process recently developed by HITAP. The process involves potential users of HTA information; namely (1) third party payers (public health insurers), (2) national health care program managers (Ministry of Public Health’s Depa