The 2015 meeting of the HTAi Asia Policy Forum meeting was held in Singapore, 29th -30th October 2015. The topic of the meeting was: How can HTA meet the needs of health system and government decision makers? This report represents the background paper for the meeting, as developed by OHE.

The report sets out the issues to be addressed in considering where and when HTA could be a useful aid for decision making, what HTA can be used to achieve, and where the evidence for HTA can be obtained from (including a brief recap of the transferability discussions in the 2014 meeting of the AHPF).

The final section considers how decision makers can combine all the relevant criteria and information to arrive at a decision; we discuss the spectrum of approaches from deliberative to more structured decision making processes including the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Various different approaches to MCDA could be used to add structure and transparency to decision making processes, and pilots conducted in Asia have been reported favourably. MCDA has not, however, been widely adopted in health care decision making to date.

The background papers from the 2013, 2014 and 2016 meeting are also available.