What does Health Technology Assessment do for your product?

Article by Alfonso Reyes-López

Definitions

Let's begin with a 'health technology' definition as any intervention that may be used to promote health, prevent, diagnose or treat disease or for rehabilitation or long-term care. So, according to the World Health Organization, the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is the systematic evaluation of healthcare technology's properties, effects, and/or impacts. It may address technologies' direct, intended consequences and their indirect, unintended consequences.

Its primary purpose is to inform technology-related policy-making in health care.?

How does HTA work

Depending on the specific context of the decision-making, the dimensions needed by the decisionmaker may vary, so the method must be appropriate for the decision-making process to be informed by the HTA. But the crucial part of the assessment is formulating research questions since they transpose the original decision-making problem into questions that can be answered by evaluating scientific evidence. This conceptual framework can be visualized synthetically in figure 1.

A full HTA goes beyond the assessment of safety and efficacy, cost-effectiveness, and budget impact analysis and includes the implementation strategy, social impact, legal issues, ethical issues, and policy impact. The steps of a full HTA are listed below.

The implementation of an HTA process involves three main levels of development and dissemination:

1. Macro, or the level of health care policies for which HTA, according to a now well-established approach, supports policy-making and the research for appropriateness of clinical practice, serving as a bridge that connects science and research to centralized decision making.

2. Meso, or the level represented by individual companies that provide welfare services. The role of HTA is to support managerial decision-making in search of efficiency and effectiveness when providing healthcare services and to reduce the high variability of clinical practice and organizational innovation at the processes, technology, and infrastructure level.

3. Micro or the level of clinical practice, i.e., the interaction between experts and patients, is also influenced by the specific organizational characteristics, operational powers, and a unique set of individual skills and knowledge.

Conclusion

The use of HTA has become essential for two reasons. First, the conventional wisdom is to be cautious about the use of new (and continuation of the use of old) technologies until evidence-based information is available. Second, the cost escalation of health care in general and new technologies in particular, accompanied by growing numbers of effective interventions, has made the need to prioritize inevitable, even in the world's most prosperous health care systems. Policymakers should consider the implications of HTA on the environment needed to foster the innovation of medical devices. Suppose HTA introduces significant new challenges to market entry. In that case, there is a potential to impact the rate of innovation in the device sector, which already faces several challenges.

About the author

Alfonso Reyes-López

Health Economics, Pharmaco-Economics, and Public Health Professional

Alfonso Reyes-López is the head of the?Center for Economic and Social Studies in Health at Mexico's Children's Hospital Federico Gómez. He collaborates as a health economist with a private consulting office.

Alfonso holds a Ph.D. in population studies, an MSc in health sciences, and a bachelor's degree in economics. He also has a diploma in applied statistics. Alfonso is a teacher of biostatistics and pharmacoeconomics and has published several papers about health economics, pharmaco-economics, and population health.