Methodological guidelines and publications of benefit–risk assessment for health technology assessment: a scoping review

Abstract

Objectives To map the available methodological guidelines and documents for conducting and reporting benefit–risk assessment (BRA) during health technologies’ life cycle; and to identify methodological guidelines for BRA that could serve as the basis for the development of a BRA guideline for the context of health technology assessment (HTA) in Brazil.Design Scoping review.Methods Searches were conducted in three main sources up to March 2023: (1) electronic databases; (2) grey literature (48 HTA and regulatory organisations) and (3) manual search and contacting experts. We included methodological guidelines or publications presenting methods for conducting or reporting BRA of any type of health technologies in any context of the technology’s life cycle. Selection process and data charting were conducted by independent reviewers. We provided a structured narrative synthesis of the findings.Results From the 83 eligible documents, six were produced in the HTA context, 30 in the regulatory and 35 involved guidance for BRA throughout the technology’s life cycle. We identified 129 methodological approaches for BRA in the documents. The most commonly referred to descriptive frameworks were the Problem, Objectives, Alternatives, Consequences, Trade-offs, Uncertainty, Risk and Linked decisions and the Benefit–Risk Action Team. Multicriteria decision analysis was the most commonly cited quantitative framework. We also identified the most cited metric indices, estimation and utility survey techniques that could be used for BRA.Conclusions Methods for BRA in HTA are less established. The findings of this review, however, will support and inform the elaboration of the Brazilian methodological guideline on BRA for HTA.Trial registration number https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/69T3V.