HTAD Awards

By Murilo Contó | September, 2025

The new HTAD Awards Criteria have just been approved by the HTAD Board.

The document proposes three categories of awards for engineering related professionals in the field of Health Technology Assessment of medical devices (HTA-MD):

1. HTAD Outstanding Contribution Award: for engineering practitioners engineers who has made outstanding contributions to the field of HTA-MD

2. HTAD Best Paper Award: for authors who produced an impactful and outstanding paper in the field of HTA-MD

3. HTAD Policy Award: Policymakers or stakeholders giving significant contribution to Biomedical Engineering in the field of HTA-MD

After the nomination process and selection of the best works in Medical Device HTA, the winners of the IFMBE HTAD Awards were:

IFMBE HTAD Outstanding Contribution Award

Prof. Ernesto Iadanza, University of Siena (Italy)

Prof. Ernesto Iadanza deserves this prestigious award due to his significant impact on HTA, leadership in biomedical engineering, and active roles in IFMBE for many years. His pioneering work in integrating AI with HTA methodologies, his leadership in international societies, and his role in educating the next generation of HTA professionals made him the ideal recipient of the HTAD Outstanding Contribution Award.

IFMBE HTAD Policy Award 2025

Dr. Adriana Velazquez

Dr. Adriana Velazquez has 16 years of work at the World Health Organization to ensure good quality, appropriate, affordable health technologies, to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases everywhere, specially to the sickest and the poorest. Responsible for Medical Devices Technical series, including the newest version of the guidance for HTA of Medical Devices, Development of Medical Devices Policies and the Compendium of innovative technologies for Low resource settings.

IFMBE HTAD Best Paper Awards

2022: “Depression diagnosis using machine intelligence based on spatiospectrotemporal analysis of multi-channel EEG”

Authors: Amir Nassibi, Christos Papavassiliou & S. Farokh Atashzar

2023: “Effects of home telemonitoring using non-invasive versus conventional approaches on patients affected by congestive heart failure: a systematic literature review and meta-analysis”.

Authors: Iyabosola B. Oronti, Laura Lopez-Perez, Davide Piaggio, Giuseppe Fico & Leandro Pecchia

2024: “Performance of ChatGPT on basic healthcare leadership and management questions”.

Authors: Patricia Leutz-Schmidt, Martin Grözinger, Hans-Ulrich Kauczor, Hyungseok Jang & Sam Sedaghat

2025: “Domain coverage and criteria overlap across digital health technology quality assessments: a systematic review”.

Authors: Anna-Lena Frey, Ben Phillips, Rebecca Baines, Adam McCabe, Evelyn Elmes, Emily Yeardsley-Pierce, Rachel Wall, Jake Parry, Alice Vose, Jack Hewitt, Justine Coburn, Curtis Dowdle, Leyla Sollitt, Matthew Leahy, Sophie Hunt, Tim Andrews & Simon Leigh