Deploying a spreadsheet tool for early economic value assessment of medical device innovations with healthcare decision makers

Abstract

Early stage evaluation of medical device innovations is important for healthcare decision-makers as much as for manufacturers, meaning that a wider application of a basic cost-effectiveness analysis is becoming necessary outside the usual expert base of health technology assessment specialists. Resulting from an academic-industry-healthcare professional collaboration, a spreadsheet tool is described that was designed to be accessible both to professionals in healthcare delivery organisations and to innovators in the healthcare technology industry who are non-experts in the field of health economics. The tool enables a basic cost-effectiveness analysis to be carried out, using a simplified decision-tree model to compare costs and patient benefit for a new device-related procedure with that of standard care employing an incumbent device or other alternative. Such a tool is useful to healthcare professionals because it enables them to rapidly elucidate the cost-effectiveness of heterogeneous innovations by means of the standard quality adjusted life year (QALY) measure of clinical outcome, which is intended to be broadly comparable across treatments. For the innovator or manufacturer it helps them focus on what is required for future stages of development, in order to fill gaps in the input data and so further strengthen their case from a health economics perspective. Results are presented of first experiences from deploying the tool on three medical device exemplars, in face-to-face meetings of the NHS National Innovation Centre (NIC) along with the innovator or clinical champion. The results show that mapping of device-related innovations to the tool is achievable in a short meeting between the NIC and the innovator using expected costs, outcomes data from the literature and estimates of ranges for unknown input data. Whilst the result of a simplified analysis is not expected to be definitive, the process of reasoning is found to be illuminating for the parties involved, enabling innovators to articulate the benefits of their innovations and for all parties to highlight gaps in data and evidence that will be required to take the innovation forward. The partnership model of the authors’ organisation supports the kind of cooperative design approach that is necessary to produce the kind of tool described.---------------------------7dd39101208fa Content-Disposition: form-data; name="c14_creators_1_name_family" Crave