Evidence-Informed Deliberative Processes – Early Dialogue, Broad Focus and Relevance: A Response to Recent Commentaries

The recent Health Technology Assessment international (HTAi) conference in Rome discussed how we can move ‘towards an integrated HTA framework for a more sustainable healthcare ecosystem’ and improve ‘the role of multi-stakeholder involvement in HTA to face ethical dilemmas for health system’s economic, social and environmental sustainability.’ Evidence-informed deliberative processes (EDPs) to support priority setting for universal health coverage (UHC), as described in our editorial, are well-aligned with HTAi’s call for a more integrated HTA (or priority setting) framework. EDPs specifically achieve this by promoting early deliberation among a wide variety of stakeholders to identify, reflect and learn about the meaning and importance of values, informed by evidence on these values. Being a generic value-assessment framework, it may be applied to prioritization exercises with either broad or narrow scopes and should be contextualized to its local setting.