Skip to 0 minutes and 4 seconds Today, decision makers have faced many challenges in how best to allocate health care resources. These challenges present themselves across the globe in low, middle and high income countries. They also present at different levels of decision making at the national level by government health ministers and at local levels, for example by hospital management teams. What is the cause of these challenges? Well, one important reason is that in recent times we’ve seen levels of technological innovation increase to unprecedented levels. Such innovation aims to improve health and health care for many disease areas and conditions. It is worth pointing out from the outset that technologies are not just drugs and medical devices.
Skip to 0 minutes and 45 seconds It also refers to new health policies such as smoking bans or a change in how healthcare service is organized or delivered, such as telemedicine. The demand for new technologies is high, especially if they are backed up by good evidence, and unfortunately health services cannot sustain all new developments when working within the fixed budget. Therefore, decision makers face difficult choices. This is where health technology assessment comes in. HTA helps decision makers make informed choices by interrogating the relevant information about new technologies. Key questions that HG addresses are does the technology work? Does it work for all? Is it safe?
Skip to 1 minute and 24 seconds Does it provide value for money or should we compare the technology to and who are all the stakeholders that need to be involved? In this course you will learn about the fundamental concepts of JDA and we will provide an overview of the different stages of the entire process. If you are taking this course because you are considering a career in, we hope that this is a useful first step view. Career prospects in are good and set to increase as more and more governments across the world set up agencies to formally evaluate health technologies.
