Hospital-Based Health Technology Assessment The Next Frontier for Health Technology Assessment

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.

Laura is the Head of the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Unit at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. She has over 20 years of experience in evaluative research, specifically in HTA. She also serves as chair of the HTAi Policy Forum. Previously, she has worked in the Catalan Ministry of Health and was the co-founder of the Catalan Agency per HTA. She has been the coordinator of the European Project AdHopHTA (Adopting Hospital based HTA).

Her work has focused on the development, identification, management and transfer of information to advise on the designing of strategies and policies in the areas of assessment, planning and access of medical devices, drugs, surgical procedures and other health care technologies as well as health care programs.

She has published 19 articles in national journals, 24 articles in international journals, 5 books chapters written, and 38 publications for governmental organizations related to HTA and planning. She serves as a member of the Editorial Committee of the international Journal for Health Technology Assessment.

Dr. Janet Martin is Director of the Centre for Medical Evidence, Decision Integrity & Clinical Impact (MEDICI), and Assistant Professor, Departments of Anesthesia & Perioperative Medicine and Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University in London, Canada.

She has published 120 papers and completed work on 2 books. She has twice been awarded the Medical Advisory Committee Award for her HTA&KT work at the London hospitals. Dr. Martin recently won the Teaching Excellence Award for her Clinical Epidemiology course at Western University.