Health Technology Assessment Conference

Last week one of our CLLANZ Trustees, Catherine Isaac, was very lucky to have the opportunity to attend an international Health Technology Assessment conference HTAI Conference 2023 in Adelaide.

Among the 600 attendees from around the world were patient advocacy groups, researchers, academics, public policy makers, industry, and drug funding agencies.

There was quite a strong New Zealand presence, including other patient advocacy groups and Pharmac, and it was a good opportunity for us to build relationships and have some informal discussions during the conference breaks.

Overall, the conference was an amazing opportunity to learn from international best-practice models of patient involvement in medicines funding, and to make personal connections with individuals and organisations with similar objectives to ours.

A key theme was innovation in medical treatments, health system policy and patient care.  We hope to use the lessons from this to make meaningful gains in improving the lives of New Zealanders living with CLL, through timely access to effective, international standard-of-care treatments.