The second HTAi Asia Policy Forum meeting (2014) was held in Manilla, 10th -11th June 2014. The topic of the meeting was: Transferability of HTA. This report represents the background paper for the meeting, as developed by OHE.

HTA is a tool to support health systems to make decisions about allocating their limited health care resources. In turn, HTA needs to be efficient and effective if investment in HTA is to be a sensible use of money. One important part of ensuring this will be to avoid duplication of effort by making the best possible use of existing information, and ensuring that when resources devoted to HTA are generating new information, it is likely to be of sufficient value to justify its cost.

This background paper sets out the issues to be addressed in considering when health systems can benefit from the transfer of HTA processes, decisions and/or data. We discuss the different kinds of decisions that may or may not be transferred, the different degrees of transfer possible, and how decisions can be adapted to different contexts.

Overall, we conclude that some of the barriers to transferability may be lower than is generally believed.

The background papers from the 2013, 2015 and 2016 meeting are also available.