The French National Authority for Health (HAS) Guidelines for Conducting Budget Impact Analyses (BIA)

Budget impact analysis (BIA) provides short- and medium-term estimates on changes in budgets and health outcomes resulting from the adoption of new health interventions.

The purpose of this study is to present the newly developed French National Authority for Health (HAS) guidelines on budget impact analysis as follows: process, literature review, recommendations and comparisons with other guidelines.

The development process of the HAS guidelines included a literature review (search dates: January 2000 to June 2016), a retrospective investigation of BIA previously submitted to HAS, a public consultation, international expert reviews and approval from the HAS Board and the Economic and Public Health Evaluation Committee of HAS.

Documents identified in the literature review included 12 national guidelines, 5 recommendations for good practices developed by national and international society of health economics and 14 methodological publications including recommendations for conducting BIA. Based on its research findings, HAS developed its first BIA guidelines, which include recommendations on the following topics: BIA definition, perspective, populations, time horizon, compared scenarios, budget impact models, costing, discounting, choice of clinical data, reporting of results and uncertainty exploration.

It is expected that the HAS BIA guidelines will enhance the usefulness, quality and transparency of BIA submitted by drug manufacturers to HAS. BIA is becoming an essential part of a comprehensive economic assessment of healthcare interventions in France, which also includes cost-effectiveness analysis and equity of access to healthcare.