Neuquén Health Technology Assessment Agency: What Law 3563 Sets Up

Law 3563, sanctioned in June 2026, creates a Neuquén health technology assessment agency. The law has been passed, but the regulation that will set out how the agency works is still pending. In an interview, Undersecretary of Health Services Guadalupe Montero explained what the agency is for, how it will reach its decisions, and why its reports will be binding for the provincial public system.

Neuquén health technology assessment: what the law creates

The agency is a technical, decentralized body inside the provincial Ministry of Health. Asked whether it runs alongside the Ministry or inside it, Montero answered:

“It works within the Ministry, but with decentralized functions.”

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Its output is a technical report with a recommendation on whether a technology should be adopted and under what conditions. The Legislature’s summary of the bill lists the same functions: evaluations, opinions, technical reports and recommendations on coverage and use in the public sector.

What counts as a health technology

Montero used a broad definition. A health technology can be a drug, a program or a device that takes part in diagnosis, care or follow-up. It can also be a procedure, a screening program, a piece of equipment or a digital tool. The interviewer first assumed the term meant hospital machines, such as equipment used in heart surgery on babies. Montero said a drug that has been in use for years may also need review, and may need to be dropped if it no longer adds value. The official definition extends to electronic health records, interoperability, telemedicine, e-prescribing and software, with attention to security, traceability and data protection.

How an assessment works

Montero described the process as multidisciplinary and explicit. Each assessment is produced by a team that includes physicians, biochemists, economists and sociologists. She said the reports are meant to be transparent and public.

“It is a team made up of physicians, biochemists, economists and sociologists.”

“All of this is so that it can be reproduced.”

The questions come in a fixed order. The first is safety: if a technology is not safe, the assessment stops there. The second is clinical benefit: is it important enough? The third is equity: should it be offered to the people who need it? Only after those steps does the budget analysis come in, which shows decision makers what the technology would cost the province.

Binding for whom

The agency’s reports are binding for the provincial public health system and for the provincial social security institute, ISSN, which the Ministry’s own release names as the main funder of the provincial subsector. Montero said:

“The agency is binding for public health and for the provincial obra social.”

According to the interview, prepaid plans and national health insurance funds can adopt the agency’s recommendations, but the law allows them not to. A Comunicar Salud report puts the reach of the binding part at more than 70 percent of the population when the public system and the provincial obra social are combined. The same report says the law also provides for representatives of the public sector, health insurers, private providers, universities, professional associations and patients to take part.

Other systems are writing patient involvement into HTA law as well. Spain’s Real Decreto 415/2026 writes patient and carer participation into every stage of the process.

Not a tool to restrict medicines

Montero returned several times to one point: the agency is not a restriction tool.

“The agency is not a body for restriction or for cutting costs. Its job is to secure the best clinical benefit for the population.”

She also said a new product is not better just because it is new:

“Because not everything new, and not everything that appears new on the market, is better.”

She rejected cost as a reason to say no on its own:

“The answer is: we do not adopt this because it is not safe, or because this drug’s clinical benefit is the same as that one’s, but this one costs less.”

Her example was the HPV test for early detection of cervical cancer. When national funding for it stopped, the undersecretary at the time asked the provincial technology committee, which predates the agency, to assess whether Neuquén should keep paying for it. The committee weighed the budget impact against the benefit. Montero said:

“We did an assessment, and it was decided that, beyond the budget impact for the province, it was right to do it, because the benefit is very clear and very important.”

The provincial obra social was then asked to lower the co-payment so that the service was fully covered.

Why Neuquén is building this now

Montero said Neuquén has roughly 40 years of drug committee history and 15 years of a technology evaluation committee inside the Ministry. A Ministry official, Santiago Hasdeu, told a panel that the existing committee resolved about 75 percent of coverage exception requests over the past 15 years, in an average of four and a half days, according to Comunicar Salud. Montero said earlier attempts to create a national HTA agency, under the Macri government, did not succeed.

She said three provinces are building agencies: Mendoza and Neuquén, which are set up by law, and Santa Fe, which is set up by decree rather than a law passed by the legislature. Similar debates over medicine prices are under way in other Latin American countries, and industry is making a parallel case for unified regional strategies rather than country-specific plans.

A heart attack case shows the network question

A recent case raised in the interview was a heart attack patient transferred from Chos Malal to Neuquén city. Montero said the answer sits in the care network, not in one product. At first, thrombolysis, the clot-busting drug used for acute heart attack, was given only in a few places, including the Castro Rendón hospital and some sites in the Confluencia area. Patients elsewhere in the province often arrived too late for it. The provincial committee evaluated the gap and proposed a different model, which Montero described:

“We went from having only four or five centers where acute treatment was given to almost ten in the rest of the province.”

“It is an active on-call cardiology service: cardiologists answer the phone, and we trained teams in different parts of the province to use the drug in acute care.”

She stressed that this was not a large investment. The example matters for the agency, she said, because an assessment can cover a care network as well as a single product.

Digital health is inside the mandate

The agency’s remit includes digital tools. Montero said the province is working toward a unified clinical record, so that lab results from private laboratories can reach a patient’s file in the public system. The agency, she said, also has to work on interoperability:

“So the agency also has to work on interoperability between clinical records.”

The same questions are now reaching HTA more broadly. Syenza has covered how AI is reshaping health economics, from building models to the skills researchers need.

What is still pending

Regulation is the open question. Montero said:

“What is true is that this will be progressive, because the agency’s operating capacity is not yet regulated.”

She said the agency will not evaluate everything at once. Priority will go to the most relevant technologies, starting with those already in use. The model described in the interview is a permanent technical core, with specialists brought in for each report according to the technology under review. Until the regulation is published, the agency’s operating capacity, its staffing and its first priority list remain open questions.

Source: Interview with Undersecretary of Health Services Guadalupe Montero, Neuquén Province; transcript supplied to Syenza News and translated from Spanish. Law and status details: Neuquén Ministry of Health; Legislature of Neuquén; Comunicar Salud.