Goals and Agenda

Goals and Agenda:

1). To implement a methodology to assess medical technologies, both emerging and existing, focusing on hospital-based health technologies.

2). To strengthen EAA (Early Alert Assessment) activities including approaches for the identification, description, and assessment of new or emerging health technologies, and their potential impact on health services and existing health technologies. The actual setting is the hospital environment striving to achieve better more transparent decision-making towards the adoption of medical technologies for the benefit of both patients and caregivers.

3). ICET is conducting HTA processes designated to identify and maximize beneficial values via technology. In the contemporary healthcare matrix, the range of potential values attributed to technologies extends far beyond clinical aspects, enveloping social, environmental, economic, ethical, and other issues. Facilitating access to beneficial technologies will naturally impact patients' quality of life.

4). The ICET evaluation processes emphasize the importance of personalized technology and promote concepts such as ‘elderly-friendly hospital’ and ‘cultural-tailored technology assessment’, accentuating the individual patient's personally appropriate/suited profile for health care provision.

5). ICET aims to initiate research and education and provide training (in the future) on new and emerging health technologies.

6). ICET strives to expand knowledge about HTA impact to assist weighted decision-making among hospital management, caregivers, and logistic professionals to maximize beneficial technology adoption. We wish to inspire diffusion on the national and the international level.

7). The basic innovative concept is that the patient and caregivers are both partners in the overall decision-making processes. Therefore, our target is to promote the diffusion of innovation among the public especially by providing transparent accessible knowledge bases.

8). We seek additional partners in this process, such as cooperation with industry, professionals to conduct budget impact analysis, etc., so that together, merging views from different perspectives and bridging differences at the earliest possible stage, we can achieve the earliest possible timing for safe adoption of the technology.

Topics of interest:

ICET is composed of three viewpoints (prisms). Each professional speaks a language of his/her own reflecting professional backgrounds, jargon, and personal views. The spectrum of outlooks attributes weights to the characteristics of the technologies, prioritizing them respectively. These differing scales raised by the team members, need to be balanced when determining the overall "value" of the technology. Together, they establish a 3D assessment perspective of innovative medical technologies to be implemented in hospitals.

ICET Agenda

1. HTA Tasks:

As the criteria for assessing technology in hospitals become more and more diverse, so does the circle of stakeholders, and specialties that are worth considering in the process. The assessment of candidate technologies considered for adoption by hospitals is conducted in professional structured committees composed of physicians, nurses, surgical teams alongside bio-technicians and engineers, safety and quality assurance professionals, as well as economists, social scientists, and information specialists. Each of the actors brings unique language and terminology to the assessment task, setting a variety of viewpoints to the question: ‘What is value-based pricing? ’More than ever, the challenge of technology assessment is to properly allocate the tasks, produce a joint discourse among the different participants, and adjust the relative weight of the different actors for varied assessment tasks. ICET research aims to examine how to create the ‘HTA dialogue’, extracting the maximum scope of benefits in hospitals and transforming data and research to policy and tools for decision-makers.

2. Cycle of Innovation:

The ever-changing world of medicine and the increasing needs in healthcare should be balanced with potential value and even benefit - clinical and financial, especially in the western world. In this world of innovation, we must identify who needs the technology and promote the diffusion of beneficial scientific accomplishments through development and prototypes, measuring value, predicting future needs. In order to understand how technologies are emerging, diffused, and eventually change into formats or become irrelevant, ICET research aspires to track all stages of the cycle of innovation. Each technology exhibits natural behavior according to a life span curve, this structured curve has a set of milestones. However, their length and weight might be changed or flexible for each technology due to different settings. Each technology emerges through a scientific "push". Breakthroughs accelerate diffusion and adoption. The balance of demand versus supply-cost-alternatives will affect the slope, so high demand will cause sharp slopes on the adoption curve. The definition of innovation is influenced by many factors related to the parameters of the caregiver, the patients, the system, and the technology itself. Examples are the clinical field (caregiver), individual references (the patients), regulations (the system) and costs, availability, and the mode of utility alternatives (the technology). Forecasting should screen a wide perspective, taking into consideration all stakeholders, challenges, barriers, and opportunities, as interfaces of caregivers, patients, and the industry may influence the tendency of early adaptors vs. late adopters.

3. Quality Vector:

How can we improve the quality of care and outcomes?

We need to focus on:

  1. Clinical concepts: The caregiver and his/her tool case stemming from the individual level to the macro environment level. Each level requires appropriate efficient tools and support ranging from coping with burnout and work overload in a risky environment, to sterilization improvement and strides in anti-infection efforts and protocol and process development. Improvement can flow from increasing physician enthusiasm, trust, and compassion.
  2. Sociological outlook: The patient, community, and society highlighting public consultation, patient-centered care, and shared decision-making in the medical "home" or care center. With compassion, the caregiver can enable the patient to take part in the decision-making process as an equal partner. Value and willingness to pay need to be founded on multiple criteria which should be transparent and based on trust to enhance the quality of life. The realm of health technologies assessment is developing nowadays in parallel to the consolidation of the patient-centered percept as the guiding principle for medical caregiving. Due to this trend, technology assessment is expected to address two main questions:
  3. a) How hospital technologies should provide the best quality vector for patients?
  4. b) How the public and particularly the patient can participate in the professional evaluation process and have a positive impact on it?

Many new assessment methods, i.e. multiple-criteria decision-making, designated to integrate social, communal, and individual ideas into the brainstorming, raise values that are not necessarily related to the traditional cost-effectiveness process of thinking (i.e. solidarity, wellbeing, family, and transparency). ICET strives to create dynamic "technology value" maps that can be relentlessly shaped and transformed into the contemporary health environment. Moreover, the mapping work accounts for the fact that the values are often raised from the idiosyncratic public discourse, and aspire to use and develop new techniques to monitor the related knowledge between the public and the decision-makers.

E-mail for more details:

Prof. Orna Tal – Director / ornatal@shamir.gov.il