Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Health Technology Assessment of Medical Devices: A Winning Hospital-Based Experience

摘要

Health technology assessment (HTA) refers to the systematic evaluation of properties, effects, and/or impacts of health technologies. It is a multidisciplinary process to evaluate the social, economic, organizational and ethical issues of a health intervention or health technology, aiming to inform a policy decision making and to support decisions pertaining to the allocation of resources. In order to empower decision makers to choose more knowingly between the different alternatives, offering a more precise and more structured output as well as eontextualized evidence for a specific technology, we developed a standardized methodological approach that integrates Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCD A) with the EuNetHTA Core Model?. This new assessment approach, compared to the Core Model?, supplies a timelier as well as eontextualized evidence for a specific technology. It makes it possible to obtain data which are more relevant and easier to interpret, and dierefore more useful for decision makers to make investment choices with greater awareness. The application of MCDA to HTA has been mainly devised to address decision-making issues at hospital levels as the numerical values of the technologies' performances cannot be always easily predictable and/or measurable being affected by the robustness of the evidences, which supports them. To overcome these issues, the proposed method, combines the static MCDA method with a dynamic Montecalo simulation allowing a structured and more precise output, giving the decision makers the possibility to knowledge-ably choose between the different alternatives considered, often in a very short time.