Health Technology Assessment PDF

Preface

Bringing a new drug to market and into the hands of a patient is a long, long process, and time is not always the patient's best friend. Patients who have a medical need are left to wonder why there isn't a cure and why does it take so long to be made available to everyone. The news that a promising cure has been discovered in the lab but that a treatment for patients is still 5 to 10 years away adds to their frustrations.

Doctors, who know that the current standard of care isn't perfect, continue to read their medical journals and attend medical conferences looking for better ways of treating their patients. Is this a new cure? Is it better than what is already out there? What are the side effects?

Governments, who receive requests to fund everything under the sun, are looking for that health technology that can make patients healthier, and, who knows, maybe even reduce costs. How much does it cost? How many patients will use it? Will the new drug save lives? How does it affect our budget? Is it worth the extra cost? Which treatment should we choose to fund?

Advocacy groups, who fight for the needs of patients, want their patient's collective voices heard and their patients to be served with dignity. Ethics and fairness must be addressed. Why are they withholding this particular drug? Why can't we have the best care for our patients? Are we being marginalized?

Even worse for patients is when a drug finally makes it through the long journey of research and has been proven effective, and makes it to the drug store, the insurance plan or government public plans won't cover it. They may say, ‘The drug does not have good value for money' or ‘The drug costs too much'. The focus of this book is whether the final value-for-money decision was made correctly or not, and after working through the chapters we provide examples where value for money could have been presented differently. But the value-for-money decision is just one of the questions that are asked by one of the users of a health technology assessment: the patients, the clinical users, the government, the patient advocacy groups and the insurance plan. A health technology assessment seeks to answer all of their questions and more.