Droste 2010

Appraisal of: Information on ethical issues in health technology assessment: How and where to find them

Reviewer(s): 

Sigrid Droste

Kristin Bakke Lysdahl

Full Reference: 

Droste S, Dintsios CM, Gerber A. Information on ethical issues in health technology assessment: How and where to find them. Int J Technol Assess Health Care 2010; 26(4): 441–449.

Short description: 

The aim of the article is to present a procedure to identify information on ethical implications of the use and value-related decision-making in the assessment of health technologies. The purpose of the project is to develop, propose and test a step-by step workflow adapted to the specific issues of information on ethical issues (searching for arguments and qualitative data). 

The article provides information on the background of developing the methodological approach as well as on the 8 working steps - Step 1 “Translation of the search question using the PICO scheme and additional components” to Step 8 “Final quality check and calculation of precision and recall”. The article is supplemented by the application results of the example “Ethical issues of autologous stem cell transplantation in metastatic breast cancer”.

Limitations stated by the author(s): 

- Not all ethical issues related to health technologies can be identified by means of the approach described. 

- Some ethical issues cannot be found with systematic approaches - additional non-systematic searching may be useful.

- The ethical issues relevant to the health technology investigated should be known in more detail before starting the systematic information retrieval.

- Alleged innovations cannot be identified as such by the methodological approach.

Limitations stated by the reviewer(s): 

- Reference(s) to the validation work could have been provided.

Study Type: 

Single study

Related Chapters: 

Legal Aspects

Ethical Analysis

Tags: 

• Databases

• Designing strategies: general

• Ethics

• Medicine

• Cochrane Library

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• Italian Union Catalogue of Serials

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