Priority setting of health interventions is often ad-hoc and resources are not used to an optimal extent. Underlying problem is that multiple criteria play a role and decisions are complex. Interventions may be chosen to maximize general population health, to reduce health inequalities of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, ad/or to respond to life-threatening situations, all with respect to practical and budgetary constraints. This is the type of problem that policy makers are typically bad at solving rationally, unaided. They tend to use heuristic or intuitive approaches to simplify complexity, and in the process, important information is ignored. Next, policy makers may select interventions for only political motives.

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the use of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) to support health technology assessment (HTA) agencies for setting healthcare priorities. However, its implementation to date has been criticized for being "entirely mechanistic," ignoring opportunity costs, and not following best practice guidelines. This article provides guidance on the use of MCDA in this context. The present study was based on a systematic review and consensus development. We developed a typology of MCDA studies and good implementation practice. We reviewed 36 studies over the period 1990 to 2018 on their compliance with good practice and developed recommendations. We reached consensus among authors over the course of several review rounds. We identified 3 MCDA study types: qualitative MCDA, quantitative MCDA, and MCDA with decision rules. The types perform differently in terms of quality, consistency, and transparency of recommendations on healthcare priorities. We advise HTA agencies to always include a deliberative component. Agencies should, at a minimum, undertake qualitative MCDA. The use of quantitative MCDA has additional benefits but also poses design challenges. MCDA with decision rules, used by HTA agencies in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom and typically referred to as structured deliberation, has the potential to further improve the formulation of recommendations but has not yet been subjected to broad experimentation and evaluation. MCDA holds large potential to support HTA agencies in setting healthcare priorities, but its implementation needs to be improved.

Objective To assess the costs and health effects of tuberculosis control interventions in Africa and South East Asia in the context of the millennium development goals. Design Cost effectiveness analysis based on an epidemiological model. Setting Analyses undertaken for two regions classified by WHO according to their epidemiological grouping—Afr-E, countries in sub-Saharan Africa with very high adult and high child mortality, and Sear-D, countries in South East Asia with high adult and high child mortality. Data sources Published studies, costing databases, expert opinion. Main outcome measures Costs per disability adjusted life year (DALY) averted in 2000 international dollars ($Int). Results Treatment of new cases of smear-positive tuberculosis in DOTS programmes cost $Int6-8 per DALY averted in Afr-E and $Int7 per DALY averted in Sear-D at coverage levels of 50-95%. In Afr-E, adding treatment of smear-negative and extra-pulmonary cases at a coverage level of 95% cost $Int95 per DALY averted; the addition of DOTS-Plus treatment for multidrug resistant cases cost $Int123. In Sear-D, these costs were $Int52 and $Int226, respectively. The full combination of interventions could reduce prevalence and mortality by over 50% in Sear-D between 1990 and 2010, and by almost 50% between 2000 and 2010 in Afr-E. Conclusions DOTS treatment of new smear-positive cases is the first priority in tuberculosis control, including in countries with high HIV prevalence. DOTS treatment of smear-negative and extra-pulmonary cases and DOTS-Plus treatment of multidrug resistant cases are also highly cost effective. To achieve the millennium development goal for tuberculosis control, substantial extra investment is needed to increase case finding and implement interventions on a wider scale.

Priority setting in health care has been long recognized as an intrinsically complex and value-laden process. Yet, health technology assessment agencies (HTAs) presently employ value assessment frameworks that are ill fitted to capture the range and diversity of stakeholder values and thereby risk compromising the legitimacy of their recommendations. We propose "evidence-informed deliberative processes" as an alternative framework with the aim to enhance this legitimacy. This framework integrates two increasingly popular and complementary frameworks for priority setting: multicriteria decision analysis and accountability for reasonableness. Evidence-informed deliberative processes are, on one hand, based on early, continued stakeholder deliberation to learn about the importance of relevant social values. On the other hand, they are based on rational decision-making through evidence-informed evaluation of the identified values. The framework has important implications for how HTA agencies should ideally organize their processes. First, HTA agencies should take the responsibility of organizing stakeholder involvement. Second, agencies are advised to integrate their assessment and appraisal phases, allowing for the timely collection of evidence on values that are considered relevant. Third, HTA agencies should subject their decision-making criteria to public scrutiny. Fourth, agencies are advised to use a checklist of potentially relevant criteria and to provide argumentation for how each criterion affected the recommendation. Fifth, HTA agencies must publish their argumentation and install options for appeal. The framework should not be considered a blueprint for HTA agencies but rather an aspirational goal-agencies can take incremental steps toward achieving this goal.

Priority setting of health interventions is generally considered as a valuable approach to support low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in their strive for universal health coverage (UHC). However, present initiatives on priority setting are mainly geared towards the development of more cost-effectiveness information, and this evidence does not sufficiently support countries to make optimal choices. The reason is that priority setting is in reality a value-laden political process in which multiple criteria beyond cost-effectiveness are important, and stakeholders often justifiably disagree about the relative importance of these criteria. Here, we propose the use of ‘evidence-informed deliberative processes’ as an approach that does explicitly recognise priority setting as a political process and an intrinsically complex task. In these processes, deliberation between stakeholders is crucial to identify, reflect and learn about the meaning and importance of values, informed by evidence on these values. Such processes then result in the use of a broader range of explicit criteria that can be seen as the product of both international learning (‘core’ criteria, which include eg, cost-effectiveness, priority to the worse off, and financial protection) and learning among local stakeholders (‘contextual’ criteria). We believe that, with these evidence-informed deliberative processes in place, priority setting can provide a more meaningful contribution to achieving UHC.