Diagnostics is not Cinderella of health technology assessment

doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7537.364-c

BMJ 2006;332:364-365 (11 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7537.364-c

Letter

Diagnostics is not Cinderella of health technology assessment

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Furness makes an important point about the lackof emphasis on diagnostics but ironically has the wrong diagnosis.¹As we tried to make clear in our editorial,² there is a longchain from health technology assessment (the scientific summationof evidence about effectiveness) through appraisal (the policyrelated judgments that the National Institute for Health andClinical Excellence (NICE) and others then make on the basisof the assessments) to the implementation and availability ofservices. The neglect of diagnostics lies not with health technologyassessment but further along the chain.

The NHS programme for health technology assessment has givenmuch attention to diagnostics. Although health technology assessmentcovers all healthcare interventions from health promotion throughdisease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitationthrough to continuing care, the programme has devoted one ofits four expert panels (until this year, one of only three)entirely to diagnostics and screening. . . . [Full text of this article]

John Gabbay, professor emeritus¹, Tom Walley, professor of clinical pharmacology²

¹ Wessex Institute for Health Research and Development, University of Southampton SO16 7PX jg3@soton.ac.uk, ² Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GF