Our speakers: K

Rabia Kahveci is the Vice President of the HTAi, and Senior Technical Advisor for Pharmaceutical Policy and Governance in the SAFEMed project, in Kyiv Ukraine. SAFEMed project is a USAID funded and MSH led project that supports Ukrainian government. SAFEMed applies health system strengthening best practices to create evidence-based interventions and strengthen Ukraine’s pharmaceutical system. Her area of responsibility is to support priority setting and HTA, including and beyond capacity building and HTA institutionalization in Ukraine, as well as supporting pricing and reimbursement policies for health technologies. Besides her full time work at SAFEMed, she has been an active member of the HTAi for many years and served in the Board of Directors twice before being elected as the VP. During these years she chaired Annual Meeting Committee; co-chaired International Scientific Program Committee of HTAi Annual Meeting in Rome (2017); chaired Developing Countries Interest Group, co-chaired Medical Devices Interest Group; chaired the Organizing Committee of HTAi Regional Meeting hosted by Ukraine, in September 2020. She also chairs the Eurasian HTA Initiative that has members from 9 countries from Balkans and Central Asia. She acted as the President of the Turkish Evidence-Based Medicine Society for eight years. Prior to her position with SAFEMed, she was the director of a hospital-based HTA center in Turkey (ANHTA) that covered HTA, innovation for medical devices, and real-world evidence. She was a professor of family medicine in the same hospital. She contributed to several national and international projects around HTA, including EUnetHTA and AdHopHTA. ANHTA showed an impact of 2.5 million euros savings in 3 years, and stood as an outstanding example for HB-HTA at the global level. She served as the national clinical quality coordinator of the Turkish Ministry of Health in 2017, where she coordinated all activities involving HTA, clinical guidelines and quality. Prior to ANHTA, she served as a member of the Pharmaceuticals Reimbursement Committee of the Turkish Social Security Institution during the transition to universal health coverage and was a co-author of the reimbursement guidelines. She worked in the Turkish Medicines Agency on pricing and reimbursement of pharmaceuticals and led the HTA work of the Agency. Being an academic and medical doctor by background, with a degree in HTA, Prof. Kahveci authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles, 8 books and delivered over 300 presentations in international meetings on HTA. top