Adaptive health technology assessment to facilitate priority setting in low- and middle-income countries

### Summary box\n\nTraditional health technology assessment (HTA) is a policy-based research process, which aims to improve the efficiency and equity of the healthcare system with the limited financial resources available in healthcare.1 In various countries, traditional HTA has been ‘institutionalised’—through the development of dedicated agencies with accepted norms and rules that guide explicit priority setting—over years or decades. These agencies use time-consuming, data intensive and systematic methods and processes which require health economics expertise and resources to make recommendations on how to allocate finite resources.2\n\nThere is a growing appetite for HTA and its eventual institutionalisation in low- and-middle income countries (LMICs) driven in part by WHO’s recommendation for it to be a critical component to achieving universal health coverage.3 While there are notable LMIC exceptions of introducing and institutionalising HTA (eg, Thailand, Colombia, Brazil and India), others may be constrained by limited technical and administrative capacity, paucity of data, time and governance structures to carry out HTA.4\n\nA more pragmatic approach …