Technological change in healthcare has led to huge improvements in health services and the health status of populations. It is also pinpointed as the main driver of healthcare expenditure. Although offering remarkable benefits, changes in technology are not free and often entail significant financial, as well as physical or social risks. These need to be balanced out in the setting of government regulations, insurance contracts, and individuals' decisions to use and consume certain technologies. With this in mind, this book addresses the following important objectives: to provide a detailed analysis of what technological change is; to identify drivers of innovation in several healthcare areas; to present existing mechanisms and processes for ensuring and valuing efficiency and development in the use of medical technologies; and to analyse the impact of advances in medical technology on health, healthcare expenditure, and health insurance. Each of the seventeen chapters summarizes an important issue concerning the innovation debate and contributes to a better understanding of the role innovation has both at the macro level and at the delivery (meso) and micro level in the healthcare sector. The effectiveness of innovation in improving people's welfare depends on its diffusion and inception by the relevant agents in the health production process, and this book recognizes the multi-faceted contribution of policy makers, regulators, managers, technicians, consumers and patients to this technology change. This book offers the first truly global economic analysis of healthcare technologies, taking the subject beyond simply economic evaluation, and exploring the behavioural aspects, organization and incentives for new technology developments, and the adoption and diffusion of these technologies.

Americans praise medical technology for saving lives and improving health. Yet, new technology is often cited as a key factor in skyrocketing medical costs. This volume, second in the Medical Innovation at the Crossroads series, examines how economic incentives for innovation are changing and what that means for the future of health care. Up-to-date with a wide variety of examples and case studies, this book explores how payment, patent, and regulatory policiesâ€"as well as the involvement of numerous government agenciesâ€"affect the introduction and use of new pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and surgical procedures. The volume also includes detailed comparisons of policies and patterns of technological innovation in Western Europe and Japan. This fact-filled and practical book will be of interest to economists, policymakers, health administrators, health care practitioners, and the concerned public.

This report discusses the need for an integrated and cyclical approach to managing health technology in order to mitigate clinical and financial risks, and ensure acceptable value for money. The analysis considers how health systems and policy makers should adapt in terms of development, assessment and uptake of health technologies. The first chapter provides an examination of adoption and impact of medical technology in the past and how health systems are preparing for continuation of such trends in the future. Subsequent chapters examine the need to balance innovation, value, and access for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, respectively, followed by a consideration of their combined promise in the area of precision medicine. The final chapter examines how health systems can make better use of health data and digital technologies. The report focuses on opportunities linked to new and emerging technologies as well as current challenges faced by policy makers, and suggests a new governance framework to address these challenges.

In financially constrained health systems across the world, increasing emphasis is being placed on the ability to demonstrate that health care interventions are not only effective, but also cost-effective. This book deals with decision modelling techniques that can be used to estimate the value for money of various interventions including medical devices, surgical procedures, diagnostic technologies, and pharmaceuticals. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of the appropriate representation of uncertainty in the evaluative process and the implication this uncertainty has for decision making and the need for future research. This highly practical guide takes the reader through the key principles and approaches of modelling techniques. It begins with the basics of constructing different forms of the model, the population of the model with input parameter estimates, analysis of the results, and progression to the holistic view of models as a valuable tool for informing future research exercises. Case studies and exercises are supported with online templates and solutions. This book will help analysts understand the contribution of decision-analytic modelling to the evaluation of health care programmes. ABOUT THE SERIES: Economic evaluation of health interventions is a growing specialist field, and this series of practical handbooks will tackle, in-depth, topics superficially addressed in more general health economics books. Each volume will include illustrative material, case histories and worked examples to encourage the reader to apply the methods discussed, with supporting material provided online. This series is aimed at health economists in academia, the pharmaceutical industry and the health sector, those on advanced health economics courses, and health researchers in associated fields.

Technological change in healthcare has led to huge improvements in health services and the health status of populations. Although offering remarkable benefits, these changes often entail significant financial, physical and social risks. This book analyses the impact of advances in medical technology from an economic perspective.

A wave of new health care innovation and growing demand for health care, coupled with uncertain productivity improvements, could severely challenge efforts to control future health care costs. A committee of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine organized a conference to examine key health care trends and their impact on medical innovation. The conference addressed the following question: In an environment of renewed concern about rising health care costs, where can public policy stimulate or remove disincentives to the development, adoption and diffusion of high-value innovation in diagnostics, therapeutics, and devices?

Technological development has created major possibilities for the treatment of disease and for the disabled. The cost of new technologies has added considerably to health care cost intlation, which still exceeds the growth rates of most national economies. The share of national resources devoted to health care is still rising, although at a lesser pace than in the seventies. -Therefore, the use of medical technology confronts us with some of the major dilemmas in society today. The routine and intensive use of technology has transformed the most basic interpersonal and social features of medicine. It has altered the means through which patient and doctor communicate about illness as well as the content of this communication, changed the doctor's relationship to medical colleagues by increasing his dependence on them, altered the place and form of practice by creating advantages for the centralization of medical care in complex organizations, and created for society new responsibilities and powers to influence the context and scope of medical practice.