Value of information analysis for use in health technology assessment

Nowadays every decision is, less or more, associated with uncertainty. In everyday life we are intuitively trying to reduce this uncertainty by collecting new information, e.g. reading newspapers or watching TV. In health technology assessment, where we should consider besides health effects also safety, technical parameters, economic impacts etc., we can do it in more sophisticated and specific ways - through the specialized literature, consultation with experts certain decision problems or collection of new evidence in additional research. Theoretically, we can do this over and over until we have enough evidence to confirm our decision. Practically, facing limited resources, mostly financial, we have to find balance between information gathering and our resources and here we can use value of information analysis.