Introduction: Chronic graft-versus-host disease (chronic GVHD) is a leading cause of late death and contributes significantly to morbidity following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. This study aims to provide a systematic literature review on incidence, mortality and relapse of chronic GVHD patients. Areas covered: The authors searched for English-language articles published between 2007 and 2017 using PubMed. Studies that applied the 2005 or 2015 NIH Consensus Criteria for the diagnosis and staging of chronic GVHD, and had a cohort size of at least 100 patients were included. Expert opinion: The authors found a wide variation of incidence rates, which can be explained by heterogeneity in the characteristics of study samples and applied transplantation protocols. Chronic GVHD was associated with higher non-relapse mortality (NRM), superior overall survival (OS) and lower risk of relapse. Studies indicated an increased risk for NRM and worse OS in the presence of more severe disease. Future therapies should focus to reach a delicate balance between controlling disease severity among patients diagnosed with chronic GVHD and preserving the graft versus tumor effect which goes along with chronic GVHD and results in improved OS and decreased relapse rate. Nonetheless, factors predicting disease severity still need to be further understood.

Health technology assessment (HTA) is not simply a mechanistic technical exercise as it takes place within a specific institutional context. Yet, we know little about how this context influences the operation of HTA and its ability to influence policy and practice. We seek to demonstrate the importance of considering institutional context, using a case study of Hungary, a country that has pioneered HTA in Central and Eastern Europe. We conducted 26 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with public- and private-sector stakeholders. We found that while the HTA Department, the Hungarian HTA organisation, fulfilled its formal role envisaged in the legislation, its potential for supporting evidence-based decision-making was not fully realised given the low levels of transparency and stakeholder engagement. Further, the Department’s practical influence throughout the reimbursement process was perceived as being constrained by the payer and policy-makers, as well as its own limited organisational capacity. There was also scepticism as to whether the current operational form of the HTA process delivered ‘good value for money’. Nevertheless, it still had a positive impact on the development of a broader institutional HTA infrastructure in Hungary. Our findings highlight the importance of considering institutional context in analysing the HTA function within health systems.

The importance of integrated care will increase in future health systems due to aging populations and patients with chronic multimorbidity, however, such complex healthcare interventions are often developed and implemented in higher income countries. For Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries it is important to investigate which integrated care models are transferable to their setting and facilitate the implementation of relevant models by identifying barriers to their implementation. This study investigates the relative importance of integrated care models and the most critical barriers for their implementation in CEE countries. Experts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Serbia were invited to complete an online survey within the SELFIE H2020 project. 81 respondents completed the survey. Although experts indicated that some integrated care models were already being implemented in CEE countries, the survey revealed a great need for further improvement in the integration of care, especially the managed care of oncology patients, coordinated palliative care of terminally ill patients, and nursing care of elderly with multimorbidity. Lack of long-term financial sustainability as well as of dedicated financing schemes were seen the most critical implementation barriers, followed by the lack of integration between health and social care providers and insufficient availability of human resources. These insights can guide future policy making on integrated care in CEE countries.

This study aimed to investigate the distribution of European Union (EU) healthcare research grants across EU countries, and to study the effect of the potential influencing factors on grant allocation. We analysed publicly available data on healthcare research grants from the 7th Framework Programme and the Horizon 2020 Programme allocated to beneficiaries between 2007 and 2016. Grant allocation was analysed at the beneficiary-, country-, and country group-level (EU-15 versus newer Member States, defined as EU-13). The investigated country-level explanatory variables included GDP per capita, population size, overall disease burden, and healthcare research excellence. Grant amounts per 100,000 inhabitants were used as an outcome variable in the regression analyses. Research funds were disproportionally allocated to EU-15 versus the EU-13, as 96.9% of total healthcare grants were assigned to EU-15 countries. At the beneficiary level, EU funding was positively influenced by participating in previous grants. The average grant amount per beneficiary was higher for EU-15 organizations. In the multiple regression analysis GDP per capita (p = 0.002) and research excellence (p<0.001) had a significant positive association with EU funding. Population size had an inverted U-shaped relationship with EU funding for healthcare research, having the largest per capita funding in second and the third quartiles (p = 0.03 and p = 0.02). The uneven allocation of healthcare research funds across EU countries was influenced by GDP per capita, medical research excellence and population size. Wealthier countries with an average population size and strong research excellence in healthcare had more EU funding for healthcare research. Higher disease burden apparently was not associated with more EU research funding. While our findings are in line with analyses on previous periods, they suggest that the EU did not implement any effective policy measures to improve the unfair allocation of research grants.

Objective: To maximize benefits and reduce potential harms of organized cancer screening programs in Europe, monitoring, quality assurance, and evaluation of long-term impact are required. We aimed to identify the most important indicators to be collected and reported. The study was designed to establish a consensus within a European-level working group and suggest a manageable list of key indicators. Methods: We conducted a Delphi study among policymakers, researchers, and program coordinators who were experts in breast, cervical, or colorectal cancer screening. Study participants evaluated the importance of screening indicators on a 5-point Likert scale. Results: The top 10 indicators by study participants were interval cancer rate, detection rate, screening attendance, screening coverage, cancer incidence, cause-specific mortality, proportion of persons attending further assessment after a positive screen test result, proportion of persons attending a treatment after diagnosis, invitation coverage, and distribution of cancers by mode of detection. Performance indicators were generally considered more important than outcome indicators. Subgroup analyses by cancer types showed similar results, and only cervical cancer screening experts had slightly different preferences. Subgroup analyses by experts’ roles indicated that policymakers found different indicators important compared with researchers or program coordinators, probably because of their different point of view on screening. Conclusion: The implication of our priority ranking is twofold: it serves as an initial guidance for countries that have not yet established a system to collect data, and as a checklist for those where data collection is already established, to assess the comprehensiveness of their system.