Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: Health technology assessment (HTA) agencies have recognized past redundancies in evaluating new drugs, devices, and other technologies, and now understand that collaboration will increase the efficiency and sustainability of the HTA enterprise. This is called out specifically in the EUnetHTA Joint Action 3 objectives as “re-use” of published HTA results by other national and regional agencies.
Our hospital-based evidence-based practice center is pursuing the same goals as the national and regional centers of EUnetHTA. We receive more requests for HTA reports than we are able to complete ourselves; but at times, we can meet a requestor’s needs with a previously-published HTA report. This can be challenging in several ways. First, the reports may include analysis based on product costs and health system implementation strategies in the country where the HTA report was produced and therefore may be only indirectly applicable to our end-users. Second, reports vary in how they describe the evidence and present it to end-users. Finally, those HTA reports may be too long and time-consuming for our clinician and administrative clients to read in full.
Objectives: Develop a standardized product for adaptation of existing HTA reports and their findings. Our aim was to provide HTA information to committee members and other decision-makers in a way that they could quickly understand both the conclusions of the reports and the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base.
Methods: In an iterative process, we developed a new evidence report product. The Rapid Product Summary has three key features: a standard report format, a simplified ten-item instrument for reporting on the quantity and strength of evidence on the technology in question, and a rapid topic acquisition and report generation schedule that would fit within a typical 30-day committee meeting cycle. The structure of the report has a degree of flexibility to accommodate diverse types of requests.
Results: All Rapid Product Summaries completed to date have been progressed from acceptance of topic request to finished draft report in less than 30 days. Each of the Rapid Product Summary reports was three to four pages long, with all summary points included on the first page. Summarized HTA reports included ones from NICE, CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health), the ECRI Institute, and SBU (Swedish health technology assessment agency). We were unable to provide a Rapid Product Summary in response to about one-third of requests because no suitable source reports were identified.
Conclusions: By finding, adapting, and re-using existing published reports, local evidence-based practice centers can provide timely support for decisions about new and emerging technologies.
Our hospital-based evidence-based practice center is pursuing the same goals as the national and regional centers of EUnetHTA. We receive more requests for HTA reports than we are able to complete ourselves; but at times, we can meet a requestor’s needs with a previously-published HTA report. This can be challenging in several ways. First, the reports may include analysis based on product costs and health system implementation strategies in the country where the HTA report was produced and therefore may be only indirectly applicable to our end-users. Second, reports vary in how they describe the evidence and present it to end-users. Finally, those HTA reports may be too long and time-consuming for our clinician and administrative clients to read in full.
Objectives: Develop a standardized product for adaptation of existing HTA reports and their findings. Our aim was to provide HTA information to committee members and other decision-makers in a way that they could quickly understand both the conclusions of the reports and the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base.
Methods: In an iterative process, we developed a new evidence report product. The Rapid Product Summary has three key features: a standard report format, a simplified ten-item instrument for reporting on the quantity and strength of evidence on the technology in question, and a rapid topic acquisition and report generation schedule that would fit within a typical 30-day committee meeting cycle. The structure of the report has a degree of flexibility to accommodate diverse types of requests.
Results: All Rapid Product Summaries completed to date have been progressed from acceptance of topic request to finished draft report in less than 30 days. Each of the Rapid Product Summary reports was three to four pages long, with all summary points included on the first page. Summarized HTA reports included ones from NICE, CADTH (Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health), the ECRI Institute, and SBU (Swedish health technology assessment agency). We were unable to provide a Rapid Product Summary in response to about one-third of requests because no suitable source reports were identified.
Conclusions: By finding, adapting, and re-using existing published reports, local evidence-based practice centers can provide timely support for decisions about new and emerging technologies.