EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN HEALTHCARE

Emerging technologies in Healthcare

Emerging technologies in Healthcare

1. Introduction

In 2004 the European Commission and Council of Ministers targeted Health Technology Assessment (HTA) as “a political priority”, recognising that there was “an urgent need for establishing a sustainable European network on HTA”. In 2005, an invitation to tender by the European Commission was answered by a group of 35 organizations throughout Europe, led by the Danish Centre for Evaluation and HTA (DACEHTA) in Copenhagen. Since 2006 the European network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA) - co-financed by the European Commission (DG Sanco) - has coordinated the efforts of 27 European countries, including 24 EU Member States, in the evaluation of health technology in Europe (www.eunethta.net). The strategic aim of the network is to link up public national and regional HTA agencies, research institutions and health ministries, thus encouraging the exchange of information and providing support for policy decisions made by Member States. Between 2006 and 2008, EUnetHTA intends to develop an organizational framework for a sustainable European HTA network and practical tools to feed into this framework in order to ensure timely and effective production, dissemination and transfer of HTA results into useful policy advice to Member States and the EU.

One of the EUnetHTA activities is the development of an EU-wide newsletter on “emerging technologies” relevant to payers and policy makers (health care decision makers, regulatory bodies and health service planners). They all face a growing rate of new health technologies. Douw et al. illustrates this on the basis of the numbers of new drugs that were brought to market in the U.S., which increased from 239 in the 1980s to 370 in the 1990s. Health care policy makers today are operating under several - in part contrary - pressures, generating information needs:

Growing pressure to accelerate decision-making on new health technology in order to ensure that beneficial technologies are made available as quickly as possible. There is a need to push or to slow-down the speed of diffusion of health technology.

At the same time, there is the pressure or expectation to protect consumers against unsafe and ineffective technologies.

There is a need to concentrate scarce resources on the technologies that are most beneficial. Today variations in health care practice indicate unnecessary or inappropriate use of technologies. Premature introduction of new technologies could increase this variation and contribute to inefficiency and inequity in health care.

According to Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) there are currently over 2000 medicines in development. The number of new devices and procedures has also increased. Since 2001 750 technologies have been identified by EuroScan agencies, including about 100 within the last year. Trindade et al. stated already 10 years ago that at least 20 medical innovations of some significance appear every week, but less than 25% of the technologies identified as being of some significance would meet criteria for assessment. At the same time there is an increasing technology demand from patients and an increasing interest in health care issues among the ...