Toward a Chinese yardstick in TCM health technology assessment: a commentary on Theory and Methods of Health Technology Assessment in Traditional Chinese Medicine

This article reviews the newly published book Theory and Methods of Health Technology Assessment in Traditional Chinese Medicine. In response to the mismatch between conventional health technology assessment (HTA) frameworks and the holistic, individualized nature of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), this book proposes a localized “Chinese yardstick” for evaluation. It integrates standard health economic assessments with TCM-specific characteristics, drawing on over a decade of real-world research on Chinese patent medicines and non-drug therapies. Key innovations include adapting the Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, and Study design (PICOS) framework to incorporate “pattern type,” modifying Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) to account for long-standing clinical wisdom, and employing multi-criteria decision analysis. By bridging the evidence-to-policy gap, the book establishes a scientifically rigorous yet culturally appropriate HTA framework, offering a strategic roadmap for integrating TCM into modern health systems and contributing valuable insights to the global HTA discourse.