Certificate of Achievement
has completed the following course:
Health Technology Assessment: Choosing Which Treatments Get Funded
The University of Sheffield
This course explored the key processes that go into creating a Health Technology Assessment including clinical trials, systematic reviews and economic modelling. Learners discovered how the final report fits within the wider range of information used to make decisions about which treatments to fund.
4 weeks, 3 hours per week
Claire Beecroft
Information Specialist and University Teacher in Health Economics and Decision Science
The University of Sheffield
Transcript
Learning outcomes
- Explore the assessment process for a new health technology and how this applies to a potential decision outcome.
- Explain the process behind decisions about which healthcare treatments are funded to a patient or member of the public.
- Investigate a health technology assessment (HTA) and understand the evidence presented.
- Contribute to an informed discussion about whether or not a new health technology is adopted and funded by the NHS, or other national healthcare system.
Syllabus
In this course we looked at:
- What health technology assessment is and how it is applied by healthcare decision-makers to inform the choices they make about which drugs and treatments should be made available to patients- this means looking at both the benefits or effects of the treatment, and its costs.
- The kinds of evidence that can help us to decide whether a treatment is of benefit, and how much of a benefit it gives.
- The range of evidence types, with a focus on clinical trials, what they can offer, their limitations and why they are particularly important for HTA.
- The methods used to bring the existing research and evidence about a treatment together, so we can get a clear picture of what benefits the treatment offers. To do this, we looked at a technique called ‘sytematic reviewing’ which combines the evidence into a single report, and uses statistical techniques to bring the data from a number of studies together to create a single estimate of the effects of a treatment.
- The ways in which the costs of drugs and the economic impacts can be compared with those of existing treatments. To do this we looked at how a specific research technique, economic modelling, is used. We looked at the different kinds of model, their value in HTA and how they are combined with the evidence from our systematic review of the clinical effectiveness of a treatment to produce estimates of costs/benefit. We also looked at the final HTA report, to give a direct insight into the information that decision makers are presented with. We looked at how decision makers use the HTA report, in conjunction with a wider range of information and input, to make a final decision.
- We finished by briefly looking at how a decision to make a treatment available (or not) impacts on other health services.
Issued on 12th September 2016
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