Ethics in Health Technology Assessment: Understanding Health Technologies as Policies

Abstract

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) agencies strive to broaden their analyses to address more policy-relevant dimensions, including ethics. This trend has been described as transforming HTA to health technology policy analysis. A related social science concept, technology-as-policy, suggests useful directions for integrating ethics analysis into technology assessments. It challenges the HTA field to shift its focus from ethics to values and from evidence to intelligence. We describe these key concepts using recent Canadian and international innovations in HTA to illustrate promising trends.