| Project Name: |
Evaluating New Technologies |
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| Co-Investigator: |
Robert Lee and Peter Norton |
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Economic evaluation and health technology assessment of
efficacious new technologies
Research performed by the W21C team and other research teams
wording in the area of quality and safety will identify a variety of
technologies that benefit patients and/or providers. When such beneficial
technologies are identified, an important next step in the process of deciding
on their implementation in usual care is to determine if their use is
economically viable. To address this question, the W21C team will embark on a
program of research that targets the information needs of health system
decision-makers through the prompt conduct of economic evaluations and
multi-method health technology assessments. The general strategy used to perform
this research will be to quantify the benefits associated with a given
technology (e.g. difference in death rates associated with an intervention, or
difference in error rates), and in parallel to that, to quantify the difference
in cost associated with implementing the new technology. These two assessments
then permit the derivation of cost-effectiveness ratios (i.e. the difference in
cost in the numerator divided by the difference in outcome in the denominator)
that indicate the cost associated with a unit of benefit. In some instances, we
will refine those cost-effectiveness ratios by also incorporating ‘utilities’
(i.e. subject-centred measures of quality of life) that permit the derivation of
‘quality-adjusted life years’ as a measure of benefit. This research in the
domain of health economics will involve a variety of methodologies, with Markov
decision analysis modelling being prominent among those. The lead investigators
have considerable expertise in this type of work, with prior successful work in
the areas of new cardiovascular therapies (Manns, Ghali), new expensive
treatments for septic shock (Manns), and in the area of radiation oncology (Lee).
An extension of this work, led by W21C research team members
Robert Lee and Peter Norton, will assess an important information gap: Existing
health technology assessment and appraisal frameworks are typically focused on
clinical effectiveness in the context of therapeutic interventions, but often
can not easily be applied to interventions where the focus is on safety rather
than therapeutic effectiveness. Recognizing this, Lee will lead the W21C team in
the iterative formulation of a health technology assessment framework
specifically applicable to interventions that target organizational safety. The
framework will be tested and validated through its application to interventions
being tested and/or implemented in W21C research and innovation activities. |
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