Plenary II, “NextGen Methods: hype or here to stay?"(New Generation Methods: a passing fad or here to stay?), opened a new day of the HTAi International Congress (Health Technology Assessment International). More than 800 stakeholders from the health sector and health technology assessment are participating in the meeting in Buenos Aires, with IECS as the host organization.
On the basis of the first plenary session, which discussed the demands facing Health Technology Assessment (HTA) around the world, the second focused on emerging methods that can respond to the new needs of the health system: sustainability and environmental impact, adaptive health technology assessment —a rapid way to perform HTA in contexts of urgency and/or scarcity of resources— and the Artificial Intelligence (on everyone's lips) and real-world evidence, which evaluates the use, benefits, and risks of a medical product by analyzing data from its clinical use outside of the clinical trial setting.
“Three emerging methods were presented, along with how they are being prepared for implementation by governments, agencies, industry, and other stakeholders,” said Dr. Federico Augustovski, Director of the Department of Health Technology Assessment and Health Economics at IECS, plenary moderator.
In addition to Augustovski, the plenary session was moderated by Dr. Wim Goettsch, from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Dr. Marina Richardson, from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Reviews (ICER) in the United States. The speakers were Mag. Melissa Pegg, from the York Health Economics Consortium at the University of York, UK, who spoke on the sustainability and environmental impact of HTAs; Dr. Sitanshu Sekhar Kar, from the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) in India, spoke on adaptive ETS; and Dr. Cyril Seck, Advisor to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), who spoke about artificial intelligence and real-world evidence and data, as well as its use in health technologies with environmental impact.
In his presentation, Pegg called for action on the environment. “Climate change is a universal problem. We're good at collecting data, being transparent and replicable in our reporting. Let's do the same with environmental data,” he suggested.
For his part, Sekhar Kar said: “I like the Japanese proverb wabi-sabi,, which celebrates the beauty of imperfection. As HTA researchers or methodologists, we work in imperfection when the data aren't ready. The data are imperfect, the methods are imperfect. But we have to analyze them and present them to policymakers.
Finally, Seck, who spoke about the possibilities of AI, said: “AI is not a threat; it's an opportunity to challenge inertia and build stronger, more efficient systems that are better adapted to the new reality we find ourselves in. The technologies are here. The risks are real. But so are the opportunities. We need to work together to create an optimistic vision for the use of AI in healthcare.”
Following the plenary, Augustovski added that the IECS Department of Health Technology Assessment and Health Economics is working with the three methodologies and approaches presented in the plenary: adaptive HTA, real-world evidence, and artificial intelligence. The HTAi 2025 Congress, whose motto is “NextGen Evidence: Diversifying and Advancing Health Technology Assessment (HTA) to Meet Global Demands,” It takes place from June 14 to 18, for the first time in Argentina.