Obsolete health technology assessment documents ought to have a certain structure. It would be ideal if all the bodies and agencies interested in assessing obsolete technologies used a similar structure because then the reports would be more easily interchangeable among the HTA agencies and units, and could go to form a possible common database on these types of technologies.
The proposed structure is innovative in the sense that, on the method being featured at the end of the document, it might appear to forfeit a certain degree of importance. This is not so, however, since the search for evidence on the lack of effectiveness or lower safety of an obsolete technology must be systematic and have the same robustness as if it were an assessment of a new technology. It was decided to move it to the end, so that readers could directly proceed to analyse the factors that determine the technology’s obsolescence, which is really the reason for their interest in the document. The section defining the technology as obsolete assumes great importance: it is the very core of the report, where the reasons for which the assessed technology is deemed obsolete must be made crystal clear.
One aspect to be highlighted is the inclusion of the level of evidence of the literature available, something that lends the report’s conclusions and recommendations greater robustness when it comes to deciding whether there is evidence of sufficient quality for classifying the technology assessed as obsolete. For this purpose existing standards will be taken into account.
Rather than being lengthy, the proposed report should be brief and to the point, striving to be on a parallel with emerging health technology identification systems, and should be of use to managers and clinicians. These types of reports on obsolete technologies should be regularly drawn up, as just another routine task of health technology assessment agencies. Such agency reports could go to feed a common database, shared by all agencies, with links to the complete documents on the obsolete technologies in a manner akin to that of the GENTecS platform for assessment of new health technologies. Reports should also be disseminated to parties involved in the use or funding of obsolete technologies.