The ABC of HTA course
Interactive HTA learning: from fundamentals to practice.
Orientation
A first map of the field — how medicine, statistics, and economics meet in an HTA decision.
What HTA is and why it exists
The decision problem, stakeholders, and where HTA sits in the system.
The evidence
Study designs, the evidence hierarchy, bias, confounding, and how to judge what a trial can and can't prove.
Biostatistics — reading the numbers
Variation, uncertainty, confidence intervals, p-values, and how to read the numbers a trial reports.
- 10Variation and uncertainty→
- 11Distributions and the normal curve→
- 12The standard error→
- 13The p-value→
- 14Confidence intervals→
- 15Significance and power→
- 16Multiplicity and p-hacking→
- 17Measures of effect: RR, OR, RD, NNT→
- 18Relative vs absolute risk→
- 19Odds and odds ratios→
- 20Survival analysis→
- 21Hazard ratios→
- 22Diagnostic tests→
Evidence synthesis
Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and how to tell a rigorous evidence summary from a curated one.
- 23Systematic reviews→
- 24PRISMA and study flow→
- 25Search strategy→
- 26Risk of bias: RoB 2→
- 27Risk of bias: ROBINS-I and QUADAS-2→
- 28Meta-analysis: pooling→
- 29Fixed vs random effects→
- 30Reading a forest plot→
- 31Heterogeneity and I²→
- 32Publication bias and the funnel plot→
- 33Indirect comparisons and network meta-analysis→
- 34GRADE and the certainty of evidence→
Health economics fundamentals
The four types of economic evaluation, perspective, costs, and discounting — the machinery that turns a trusted effect into a decision about money.
Measuring health outcomes
Endpoints, surrogates, quality of life, and where the QALY actually comes from.
Cost-effectiveness and the ICER
The CE plane, the ICER, the WTP threshold, net benefit.
Economic modelling
Why we model, decision trees, Markov models, half-cycle correction, partitioned survival, and model validation.
Handling uncertainty
One-way sensitivity analysis and the tornado, probabilistic sensitivity analysis, cost-effectiveness acceptability curves, scenario analysis, and the value of information.
Budget impact
Why value and affordability are different questions, population and uptake, and the payer's decision when a technology is good value but unaffordable.
Real-world evidence
Sources and why RWE matters, pragmatic trials, causal inference outside the RCT, and how RWE is used in real decisions.
Regulation & reimbursement
How HTA agencies differ around the world, the EU HTA Regulation and Joint Clinical Assessment, the reimbursement process, pricing, risk-sharing agreements, and orphan drugs.
Special topics
Where standard drug HTA has to bend: diagnostics and the test-treatment pathway, medical devices, multi-criteria decision analysis, equity, and early HTA.
The practitioner's workshop
Taking everything you've built and doing the job: reading a manufacturer's submission critically, writing the HTA report, communicating with a committee, and spotting the common red flags in a dossier.
More lessons coming soon