Last Updated on 11/06/2024 by Sarah Sarsby
At the recent British Healthcare Trades Association (BHTA) Conference 2024, Mark Chapman, Interim Director Medical Technology Digital & Diagnostics at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), delved into the NICE healthtech assessment lifecycle approach and innovative vs iterative healthcare products.
The BHTA Conference 2024 focused on the UK healthtech landscape over the next five years. It was a chance for BHTA members to hear from senior government and NHS speakers about how the changes made today will impact the future of the health service.
Mark began by explaining how NICE is transforming by developing guidance that is more:
Progress has been made on these changes, which are detailed on the slide below.
An important topic from Mark’s presentation was around whether products are innovative or iterative.
Mark said: “A product starts off massively transformative and innovative. Then, over time it iterates. By the end, it’s got a lot of additional items added to it. It’s the additional items that make it different to the predecessor, but you wouldn’t class it massively as innovative.
“The reason why it’s important to think about this is, for so many years, we’ve tried to polish what may just be another pair of shoes and convinced someone that they’re the better thing to have. That might be the case, but it’s not always the case.”
The MedTech Strategy touches on the right product for the right patient at the right time.
“When we think about innovation without differentiation, that’s what holds us back,” Mark explained. “Far too often, innovation has gone into the system, and the next innovation has come along. You don’t know whether the first one was the game-changer or the second one was the game-changer, because we’ve rarely done any full assessments.
“That’s what we want to shape NICE to be looking at more intentionally.”
With this in mind, NICE has introduced and refreshed its topic prioritisation programme. This allows NICE to select the right technologies for consideration of a NICE assessment, dependent on the evidence, availability, the access to it, and the need in the health and social care system.
Then, through various stages, NICE will start looking at how much this would cost, the system impact for that investment, population impact for that investment, and these may be cost saving. Whereas historically in the healthtech programme, everything was forced into proving cost saving.
“Once a product has been selected, we’ll embark upon a health technology assessment,” continued Mark. “A health technology assessment is a collective term that describes a set of methods and approaches to assess the value proposition of a technology.”
A key point from Mark’s presentation was around NICE’s life cycle approach to healthtech assessments. See the slide below for further details.
Where possible, real-world evidence (RWE) will be prioritised for late-stage healthtech assessments, added Mark.