This special theme concerns health technology assessment (HTA) and ethics. First, what is HTA? Following Congressman Daddario (1967), who introduced the legislation that established the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1972, OTA defined it as "a form of policy research that systematically examines short- and long-term consequences of the application of a health technology" (OTA 1976). A later formulation was that HTA is "a structured analysis of a health technology, a set of related technologies, or a technology-related issue that is performed for the purpose of providing input to a policy decision" (Banta 1997, p 336).
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