| Summary: | The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) provides guidance, sets quality standards and manages a national database to improve people's health and prevent and treat ill health. The Medical Technologies Evaluation Programme identifies medical technologies that have the potential to offer substantial benefit to patients and/or to the NHS and are likely to be adopted more consistently and more rapidly if NICE develops guidance on them. NICE selects and evaluates medical technologies to determine whether the case for adoption in the NHS is supported by the evidence. A diagnostic technology is a medical technology with a diagnostic purpose. Diagnostic technologies are a subset of medical technologies. Genetic tests are covered by the Programme provided they have a medical purpose and fall within the scope of Council Directive 98/79/EC. This process guide describes how NICE selects medical technologies for national evaluation. It also describes how the Medical Technologies Advisory Committee (MTAC or 'the Committee') develops guidance on selected technologies routed to it for evaluation. The procedure is designed so that guidance is developed for the NHS in an open, credible, transparent and timely way, allowing appropriate input from relevant stakeholders. This process guide should be read in conjunction with the 'Medical Technologies Evaluation Programme methods guide', available on NICE's website (www.nice.org.uk)
|
|---|