Edinburgh Napier University

  Blog: Dr Tsung-Mei Cheng opened the afternoon session on Health Technology Assessment (HTA) at the 2014 Global Health Forum in Taiwan. Her presentation on “Evidence Based Health Policy for Accountable Care: the Role of Health Technology Assessment” gave a fascinating insight into the fact that much of healthcare is not responsibly accounted for. Dr Cheng describes that much of health policy lacks any reliable evidence base and it is often drive by political consideration and vested interest groups to the detriment of patients. She reported some worrying statistics published in the British Medical Journal that 48% of all clinical treatments have are of unknown effectiveness with only 13% proven to have beneficial effects for patients.