"The rise of complex, chronic diseases in an ageing European population led to the development of increasingly complex technologies. Current HTA is not well equipped to assess complex technologies due to a lack of attention to the diversity in patient characteristics and patient preferences, the limited consideration of context and implementation issues, and missing strategies to integrate all these aspects into a comprehensive assessment.We shall develop concepts and methods for HTA to enable a patient-centered, integrated assessment of the effectiveness, and the economic, social, cultural and ethical issues of complex technologies that takes context and implementation into account. We shall use palliative care for our case study as it is of extremely high relevance and it is an excellent example for a highly complex technology.More specifically, we shall adapt and develop methods and concepts- to assess the effectiveness and economic, social, cultural, and ethical issues of complex technologies,- to elicit patient preferences and patient-specific moderators of treatment- to include context, setting, and implementation- and, finally, to integrate these issues into a patient-centered, comprehensive assessment of complex technologies.Concepts and methods will be tested through assessing the complex technology “Specialist palliative care”. Revised guidance will be issued for comment to all relevant stakeholders.All partners of the consortium have an outstanding track record in the development of HTA methodology and are actively involved in major international initiatives in the field. The project will complement the work of similar initiatives and projects on HTA development, especially EUNetHTA/EUNetHTA JA and inform HTA agencies in all European countries. By focusing on an integrated assessment, we shall also match the need of policy-makers who prefer this to dealing with scattered information on innovative and complex technologies."