An EU-wide approach to HTA: an irrelevant development or an opportunity not to be missed?

An EU-wide cooperation on HTA has been proposed recently by the European Commission, focusing on relative effectiveness assessment (REA) for pharmaceuticals and medical devices. This cooperation is operationalised through a proposal for a regulation. While a good step in the right direction, this HTA cooperation framework needs to be more explicit and pragmatic about clinical value definition, what constitutes quality of evidence, how real-world evidence is handled, whether the same assessment requirements will apply for medical devices as they do for pharmaceuticals, and how to safeguard consistency in REA interpretation. If demand-rather than supply-driven, this initiative can deliver wider benefits: Europe can improve its power in global drug design and development, while Member States will have at their disposal more resources to assess performance of interventions in their healthcare systems.