Tony, M., Wagner, M., Khoury, H., Rindress, D., Papastavros, T., Oh, P., & Goetghebeu, M.M. (2011). Bridging health technology assessment (HTA) with multicriteria decision analyses (MCDA): field testing of the EVIDEM framework for coverage decisions by a public payer in Canada. BMC Health Services Research, 11(329). Retrieved from http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/11/329.

“Making decisions about the appropriate allocation of scarce healthcare resources is a necessary but difficult task. It involves consideration of a number of decision criteria, processing disparate streams of information and balancing individual and group/jurisdictional perspectives, not to mention ethical principles. This complex process demands transparency, consistency, and accountability to be perceived as legitimate by the public and healthcare providers and to increase the likelihood of making good decisions…

Consistent healthcare decisionmaking requires systematic consideration of decision criteria and evidence available to inform them. This can be tackled by combining multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) and Health Technology Assessment (HTA). The objective of this study was to field-test a decision support framework (EVIDEM), explore its utility to a drug advisory committee and test its reliability over time. (The study found that by) promoting systematic consideration of all decision criteria and the underlying evidence, the framework allows a consistent approach to appraising healthcare interventions. Further testing and validation are needed to advance MCDA approaches in healthcare decision-making.”