AI is expected to be a growth area in many aspects of healthcare, including NICE’s work. The potential uses of AI for HTA is an active topic for the HTA Lab. To start, we led the development of a NICE position statement on the use of AI in evidence generation.
Health Technology Assessment Innovation Laboratory (HTA Lab)
Our HTA Lab enables us to develop creative solutions to complex problems in health technology assessment.
It offers a ‘safe space’ for creating solutions in collaboration with system partners and stakeholders.
The number, range and complexity of technologies we review has never been greater. The way these technologies are regulated in science and healthcare is also developing rapidly.
This poses a challenge when we're assessing some products. The pace of innovation can sometimes mean using our existing methods alone might not meet the needs of patients, the public and health and care system partners.
It's our duty to keep ahead of these developments to make sure patients gain rapid access to the newest and most promising treatments.
To address these challenges, we've developed the HTA Lab, which will allow us to:
develop technical and policy solutions that allow us to evaluate innovative health technologies
make sure that our guidance is useful and useable, particularly for technically complex and disruptive technology.
The HTA Lab is funded through the 2024 voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth (VPAG) Investment Programme’s initiative to support innovative health technology assessment approaches.
Find out more by watching our webinar ‘Innovation in action: inside NICE’s HTA Lab.
The HTA Lab aims to create new methods and processes for health technology assessment, taking innovation from the lab and into practice.
Nick CrabbProgramme director of scientific affairs at NICE
How does the HTA Lab work?
HTA Lab helps us work with our stakeholders and develop solutions to complex issues that affect how NICE evaluates health technologies. Based on the ‘sandbox’ concept, it is a safe environment to identify, co-create and test new approaches, push the boundaries and try out innovative ways of working, without affecting ‘live’ NICE evaluations and business as usual. This approach builds on our experience working on the European Horizon 2020 HTx project.
The exploratory, sandbox nature of HTA Lab projects means our outputs do not constitute NICE guidance and do not automatically indicate changes to NICE’s methods and processes. However, by getting ahead of innovative and challenging issues early, HTA Lab project outputs should provide the basis for NICE’s guidance-producing teams to implement appropriate solutions.
To ensure the HTA Lab delivers outputs that are relevant and useful, it is crucial that our projects involve key stakeholders. While we actively seek appropriate participants and collaborators, we also welcome expressions of interest to get involved. If you are interested in participating in one of our current projects, please email [email protected].
Our project portfolio is varied, and changes frequently as innovative health technologies and new methods are identified, and to align with organisational and system priorities. Some projects focus on a specific therapeutic area or disruptive pipeline of medicines, while others focus on a cross-cutting methodological issue. All HTA Lab projects seek to address issues relating to how NICE evaluates medicines, but several are also relevant to other forms of NICE guidance (such as guidelines, medical technologies and diagnostics). We welcome suggestions for topics that you think we should consider by email: [email protected].
Our current projects
There's growing interest in the link between HTA and environmental sustainability. The HTA Lab is looking into how we might compare the environmental impacts of certain interventions. This could provide a way for us to support the healthcare system’s net zero ambition.
This HTA Lab project aims to get a clearer understanding of the technologies that enable individualised therapies, their development pipeline, and the associated challenges. This will ultimately strengthen NICE's capacity to appraise these therapies, supporting timely patient access to innovative treatments.
Costs associated with the implementation of innovative medicines and health technologies, including new healthcare infrastructure or services, can be very high and affect cost effectiveness estimates. This project will examine methods for the incorporation of implementation costs in NICE health technology evaluations.
The HTA Lab will explore the expansion of the antimicrobial subscription model to new products, ensuring the initial implementation fort antibiotics remains unaffected. This involves identifying priority antimicrobial products and adapting NICE’s evaluation criteria and scoring system appropriately.
This project explores the potential role of AI in supporting and evolving NICE’s HTA processes. It investigates AI applications such as automation, prediction, and reasoning within HTA workflows. The aim is to identify impactful use cases, demonstrate feasibility, and develop a roadmap and long-term vision to enhance the rigour, efficiency, and responsiveness of HTA over time.
Past projects
DMDTs are anticipated to alter disease progression and change the management of Alzheimer’s disease. The HTA Lab is conducting a project to identify the key issues that are likely to emerge during the evaluation of these treatments.
Emerging treatments for MASH offer promising therapeutic prospects. However, they also present significant challenges for HTA and implementation. The HTA Lab aims to identify and examine the challenges in evaluating MASH treatments. It also seeks to increase the consistency of future economic models in this area.
Methods for the evaluation of diagnostics used in multiple care pathways
The HTA Lab has started a project to identify the challenges associated with evaluating multi-indication technologies. This will help us develop practical and pragmatic proposals for future evaluation of these technologies, so that their value is appropriately captured.
As part of NICE work to develop a proportionate approach to technology appraisals, we looked at a new approach to appraising medicines which were highly likely to need a managed access agreement.
Using real-world evidence from managed access: a review of cancer appraisals
This project, in collaboration with the our Decision Support Unit, reviewed how Systemic Anti Cancer Therapy data set (SACT) data were used in NICE appraisals exiting the Cancer Drug Fund. The HTA Lab has produced pragmatic recommendations for using SACT data routinely and more consistently, as well as suggestions to improve the use of SACT data in the future.
The HTA Lab has contributed to the development of NICE guidance on virtual ward platform technologies for providing virtual wards for people with acute respiratory infections.
Contact us
For more information, please email [email protected].