For the first time, a single reference identifies medical technology assessment programs. A valuable guide to the field, this directory contains more than 60 profiles of programs that conduct and report on medical technology assessments. Each profile includes a listing of report citations for that program, and all the reports are indexed under major subject headings. Also included is a cross-listing of technology assessment report citations arranged by type of technology headings, brief descriptions of approximately 70 information sources of potential interest to technology assessors, and addresses and descriptions of 70 organizations with memberships, activities, publications, and other functions relevant to the medical technology assessment community.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

This book provides an introduction to decision analytic cost-effectiveness modelling, giving the theoretical and practical knowledge required to design and implement analyses that meet the methodological standards of health technology assessment organisations. The book guides you through building a decision tree and Markov model and, importantly, shows how the results of cost-effectiveness analyses are interpreted. Given the complex nature of cost-effectiveness modelling and the often unfamiliar language that runs alongside it, we wanted to make this book as accessible as possible whilst still providing a comprehensive, in-depth, practical guide that reflects the state of the art – that includes the most recent developments in cost-effectiveness modelling. Although the nature of cost effectiveness modelling means that some parts are inevitably quite technical, across the 13 chapters we have broken down explanations of theory and methods into bite-sized pieces that you can work through at your own pace; we have provided explanations of terms and methods as we use them. Importantly, the exercises and online workbooks allow you to test your skills and understanding as you go along.

The very rapid pace of advances in biomedical research promises us a wide range of new drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures. The extent to which these discoveries will benefit the public, however, depends in large part on the methods we choose for developing and testing them. Modern Methods of Clinical Investigation focuses on strategies for clinical evaluation and their role in uncovering the actual benefits and risks of medical innovation. Essays explore differences in our current systems for evaluating drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures; health insurance databases as a tool for assessing treatment outcomes; the role of the medical profession, the Food and Drug Administration, and industry in stimulating the use of evaluative methods; and more. This book will be of special interest to policymakers, regulators, executives in the medical industry, clinical researchers, and physicians.

Technology assessment can lead to the rapid application of essential diagnostic technologies and prevent the wide diffusion of marginally useful methods. In both of these ways, it can increase quality of care and decrease the cost of health care. This comprehensive monograph carefully explores methods of and barriers to diagnostic technology assessment and describes both the rationale and the guidelines for meaningful evaluation. While proposing a multi-institutional approach, it emphasizes some of the problems involved and defines a mechanism for improving the evaluation and use of medical technology and essential resources needed to enhance patient care.

A timely work describing how localized hospital-based health technology assessment (HB-HTA) complements general, ‘arms-length’ HTA agency efforts, and what has been the collective global impact of HB-HTA across the globe. While HB-HTA has gained significant momentum over the past few years, expertise in the field, and information on the operation and organization of HB-HTA, has been scattered. This book serves to bring this information together to inform those who are currently working in the field of HTA at the hospital, regional, national or global level. In addition, this book is intended for decision-makers and policy-makers with a stake in determining the uptake and decommissioning of new and established technologies in the hospital setting. HTA has traditionally been performed at the National/Regional level by HTA Agencies, typically linked to governments. Yet hospitals are the main entry door for most health technologies (HTs). Hospital decision-makers must undertake multiple high stakes investment and disinvestment decisions annually for innovative HTs, usually without adequate information. Despite the existence of arms-length HTA Agencies, inadequate information is available to hospital decision-makers either because relevant HTA reports are not yet released at the time of entry of new technologies to the field, or because even when the report exists, the information contained is insufficient to clarify the contextualized informational needs of hospital decision makers. Therefore, there has recently been a rising trend toward hospital-based HTA units and programs. These units/programs complement the work of National/Regional HTA Agencies by providing the key and relevant evidence needed by hospital decision makers in their specific hospital context, and within required decision-making timelines. The emergence of HB-HTA is creating a comprehensive HTA ecosystem across health care levels, which creates better bridges for knowledge translation through relevance and timeliness.