CHANDIGARH, 26.12.24-partment of Health Research, Government of India, has developed an online Health Technology Assessment (HTA) course for policy makers, which was launched on the Government of India’s iGOT Mission Karamyogi Platform. The course has been designed by the HTA Resource Hub of PGI, which has been established in Department of Community Medicine and School of Public Health. The launch was officiated by Dr. V.K. Paul, Member (Health) of NITI Aayog, and Dr. Rajiv Bahl, Secretary to the Government of India, with over 150 delegates from leading medical and public health institutions nationwide in attendance, on the occasion of HTA Conclave, which was held in New Delhi on 23rd December, 2024. The course will now be freely available to all the civil servants of centre and state governments. The iGOT Karmayogi platform enables officials to explore, acquire and certify their competencies that are critical to discharging their duties.

Speaking at the launch of the course, Dr. Paul mentioned that it represents a significant step toward fostering evidence-based and transparent decision-making in healthcare in India. He further added that on a daily basis, healthcare policy makers face the challenge in deciding that how to spend public money in a way that gives the maximum return in terms of improving people’s health. This HTA course is designed to address this challenge by equipping healthcare policymakers, including bureaucrats, administrators, program officers as well as clinicians, with the necessary skills to using economic evidence in their routine decision making, he added. Dr. Rajiv Bahl highlighted the efforts of DHR in expanding the scale of generating high quality HTA evidence. Various examples where the HTA evidence has been used by Central and State Governments and its associated cost savings as well as health benefits were highlighted.
This course has been developed under the leadership of Dr. Shankar Prinja, who is professor of health economics at PGI and heading the HTA Regional Resource Hub at the institute.