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March
Technology in American Health Care: Policy Directions for Effective Evaluation and Management
Authors: Alan B. Cohen, Ruth S. Hanft
ISBN: 0-472-11326-7
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Technology in American Health Care is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary guide to understanding how medical advances -- new drugs, biological devices, and surgical procedures -- are developed, brought to market, evaluated, and adopted into health care.
Cost-effective delivery of evidence-based health care is the sine qua non of American medicine in the twenty-first century. Health care decision makers, providers, payers, policymakers, and consumers all need vital information about the risks, benefits, and costs of new technologies in order to make informed decisions about which ones to adopt and how to use them. Alan B. Cohen and Ruth S. Hanft explore the evolving field of medical technology evaluation (MTE), as well as the current controversies surrounding the evaluation and diffusion of medical technologies, including the methods employed in their assessment and the policies that govern their adoption and use.
The book opens with an introduction that provides basic definitions and the history of technological change in American medicine, and a second chapter that explores critical questions regarding medical technology in health care. Part I discusses biomedical innovation, the development and diffusion of medical technology, and the adoption and use of technology by hospitals, physicians, and other health care organizations and professions under changing health care market conditions. Part II examines the methods of MTE -- including randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, economic evaluation methods (such as cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, and cost-utility analyses), and clinical decision analysis. Part III focuses on key public policy issues and concerns that affect the organization, financing, and delivery of health care and that relate importantly to medical technology, including safety, efficacy, quality, cost, access, equity, social, ethical, legal, and evaluation concerns.
All three parts of the book provide a historical perspective on the relevant issues, methods, and policy concerns and contain examples of technologies whose development, adoption, evaluation, and use have contributed to our understanding of the field.
This book will be invaluable in making MTE more accessible to individuals who are directly involved in the evaluation process and those who are touched by it in their professional lives -- policymakers, clinicians, managers, and researchers.
For more information or to order go to University of Michigan Press
Developments in economic evaluation in health care: a review of HEED
Author: Clive Pritchard
Publisher: Office for Health Economics
Price £7.50
Health care providers around the world are increasingly concerned with the use of economic evaluation in public policy decision making. As the application of economic criteria becomes more widespread, so sources of information on the cost-effectiveness of health care technologies become more important. One such source is HEED : the Health Economic Evaluations Database; it has already contributed to around a quarter of the first 75 technology appraisals completed by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE).
The briefing sets out the types of studies included on HEED and analyses of how they have changed over time, regarding types of evaluation, disease areas covered and study design, as well as key issues for studies using modelling methodologies. The briefing should be of interest to practitioners and consumers of economic evaluations.
To order go to OHE