Systematic Search for Information on Ethical Issues in HTA Reports on Medical Technologies or Interventions

Background: The aim of a health technology assessment (HTA) is the complete and comprehensive evaluation of a medical technology or in-tervention. This includes the consideration of ethical aspects associated with the use of a medical technology or with the technology evaluation process. In this context, ethics, as a moral philosophy, embraces issues of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Objectives: Presentation of the working steps to retrieve information on ethical aspects; documentation and description of the various information sources available, as well as of the search terms and strategies tailored to the respective information sources. Procedures: In addition to well-known national and international information sources such as bibliographic databases for HTA, biomedical sciences (e.g., MEDLINE), social sciences, and psychology, ethics databases are also used in the retrieval of information, which is performed analogously to the working steps applied in the retrieval of information for the evaluation of a health technology's clinical benefit. The databases allow search queries that present a combination of thesaurus and free-text terms or those that exclusively consist of free-text terms. The search results are completed by supplementary handsearching of ethics journals, websites of HTA institutions and institutions/organisations with key activities involving ethics and, if necessary, requests to ethics experts. Conclusion: Although the search for information on ethical issues of medical technologies is performed according to the same procedures as those that are followed in clinical benefit assessments, specific search strategies and additional specialist information sources are needed.