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.