Ethical soundness of health technology assessment reports in Islamic Republic of Iran.

Abstract

Health technology assessment (HTA) is a conventional method for evaluating reasonable use of health technologies in many countries. To investigate the ethical soundness of HTA studies in Islamic Republic of Iran. All HTA reports published by the HTA office until 2020 were reviewed using the HTA Core Model and the Q-SEA questionnaires. We evaluated 91 reports for ethical soundness. The research question, literature search and inclusion/exclusion criteria were included in 91.2%, 83.5% and 82.4% of the HTA reports, respectively. Only 13.2% of the reports explicitly stated the objective of the analysis and 6.6% stated the ethics framework. Only 2.2%, 4.4%, 9.9%, 9.9%, 14.3%, and 2.2%, respectively, of the reports, complied with the completeness, bias, policy implications, other implications, conceptual clarification, and conflicting values. HTA reports in the Islamic Republic of Iran require coordinated and integrated framework acceptable to all stakeholders to ensure their compliance with sound ethical requirements.