Higher Sustainability and Lower Opportunistic Behaviour in Healthcare: A New Framework for Performing Hospital-Based Health Technology Assessment

Abstract

Innovative health technology deployment represents the primary challenge within the sustainability of public health systems. On one hand, new technologies may potentially improve access to care and the quality of services. On the other hand, their rapid evolution and broad implications on existing procedures increase the risk to adopt technologies that are not value for money. As a consequence, Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is a critical process at each level of the National Health System. Focusing on the organisational level, this paper explores the current practices of Hospital-Based HTA (HB-HTA) in terms of management, control and behaviours of various actors involved. Among several tasks, decision-makers are appointed at managing the conflict of interest around health technology development, that could pave the way for corruption or other misleading behaviours. Accordingly, the purpose of the study is proposing a new strategic framework, named Health Technology Balanced Assessment (HTBA), to foster hospital-based health technology management aimed to align strategy and actions. The conceptual model is developed on three perspectives (clinical, economic and organisational) to make the actors involved in the assessment (clinicians, health professionals, hospital managers and patients) aware of the impact of new technology on the value chain. Besides supporting the decision-making process, such a tool represents support for the internal control system as a whole. By promoting structured evaluation, it increases transparency and accountability of public health organisations. Moreover, in the long run, the framework proposed will be useful to reach selected United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) to enhance the quality of healthcare in the future.

Understanding innovation of health technology assessment methods: the IHTAM framework

“…Once a method is adopted, concerted effort is required by all stakeholders who are qualified as practitioners to implementing the method (37). Developers, with knowledge of a novel method, should continuously provide technical assistance and work with practitioners to adjust implement strategies to various contexts when necessary (22;42;43). A feedback loop, which cycles through the method application by monitoring, adoption, and tailoring, could make an HTA method more sustainably entrenched within a context (37).…”

Recognizing New Trends in Brain Drain Studies in the Framework of Global Sustainability

“…However, considering the brain drain concept in a panoramic and non-specific way. Such panoramic perspective understands brain drain as a social phenomenon mainly related to sustainable technological development, a sustainability type that has recently been studied within the SDGs framework [121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129][130].…”

Management of Open Innovation in Healthcare for Cost Accounting Using EHR

“…According to several authors, innovation applied to the digital health sector has different applications. For this reason, hospitals and health clinics have to consider strategies and actions which promote the management of technologies [44][45][46].…”