RESULTS Introduction to health technology assessment Health technology assessment and cost-effectiveness analysis have become established methodologies http://www.selleckchem.com/products/BI6727-Volasertib.html in many countries of the developed world, where policymakers have come under pressure to provide broad access to healthcare, while faced with increasingly limited resources. To varying degrees, the developed nations have incorporated economic evaluation of incremental value into the processes by which new drugs and medical technologies are made available to consumers of healthcare. Implicit in these assessments is the concept of the opportunity cost of providing one health technology over another and the recognition that upfront investment in public health can be cost-saving over the longer term.

To the extent that the resources invested in healthcare in India are limited, HTA may be a means by which future healthcare expenditure in India can be allocated fairly and efficiently. There are many potential applications for HTA in India and other low- and middle-income countries, including:[15] Guiding public reimbursement of healthcare, as in several nations, including Australia, Sweden, and the UK Informing the nationwide or statewide pricing strategy for new drugs or drug classes Helping national healthcare policymakers to draw up clinical practice guidelines to ensure consistency of provision and evidence-based interventions for maximum efficiency. However, various aspects of the developed-world paradigm of HTA are not transferable to countries such as India.

Healthcare budgets in the developed world often have the flexibility to fund interventions if they promise a certain level of health benefits, whereas, in the developing world budget constraints are more likely to preclude the provision of any new interventions above a threshold level of expenditure, regardless of the potential return on that investment. Second, the demographics of many developed nations in the world are stable and the populations of healthcare consumers are well-characterized. Taking into account India’s rapid population growth, it becomes clear that the annual cost of providing any new technology is far from static. The predominance of OOP payments in the Indian healthcare sector has implications for the application of any nascent HTA initiatives.

Experience in countries where HTA is a well-established methodology, such as Canada and the UK, suggests that irrespective of the identity Entinostat of payers ?? be they government, insurance companies or private individuals ?? there is a growing reluctance to pay the high prices associated with new healthcare technologies. Health authorities are demanding increasingly robust demonstrations of the incremental value of novel interventions over the established standards of care. Payers agree to fund the new technologies only when manufacturers have provided sufficient evidence of ??value for money??, which may be defined differently in different necessary countries.