Happy to meet you! My name is Health Technology Assessment Engine

The literature search in the field of HTA often requires a different methodology than that used to respond to clinical questions. In fact, to obtain information on the available scientific literature particularly related to the evidence based, the publishers offer many organized resources. These are primarily biomedical databases containing collections of citations and / or articles referring to the primary literature (i.e. PubMed and CINAHL) or secondary (i.e. The Cochrane Library) or third level (i.e. Essential Evidence Plus and Clin -eguide). The utilization of tools, organized in virtual aggregators, which assess health technologies, however, is less frequent. To obtain, in a short time through a Google based technology, with a simple and easy approach, the best information produced by reliable sources in the field of Health Technology Assessment. The Health Technology Assessment Unit of the Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Udine has built a search engine that allows one to obtain in a short time the available information found in reports of international agencies and qualified organizations, thus avoiding searching each individual site. The engine, called Health Technology Assessment Engine (HTAE), was built utilizing Google technology and therefore it searches in the same way. HTAE is an aggregator of about 100 URLs international and national agencies whose objective is disseminating reports / evaluations and documents related to HTA. The HTAE included mainly the sites mentioned in the manuals IHE Report: HTA on the Net: A Guide to Internet Sources of Information – Twelfth Edition (by Dagmara Chojecki and Liz Dennett) and HTA 101: Introduction to Health Technology Assessment (by Clifford Goodman) and the most accredited Italian sites. HTAE can be queried in English and/or Italian, depending on the language of the document. It is reviewed and updated frequently. The search engine is distributed to participants in HTA training courses. It is currently used by 80 people, from different professional backgrounds who have given positive feedback. On the 8th of June 2012 it was posted in the SIHTA (Italian Health Technology Assessment Society) homepage. HTAE is a useful support that produces quality results by providing an overview of the available documents on the web. The main benefit of using the search engine is to offer in a few seconds, a valid overview, from reliable sources, of the documents available online, both on technologies in use and on those emerging. HTAE can be queried in the SIHTA homepage www.sihta.it or can be placed on a registered users iGoogle page.