Webinars

Webinar One: What is the role of Health Technology Assessment during COVID-19?

COVID-19 is a highly infectious virus and currently has no accepted treatment. The global pandemic is overwhelming health systems and driving an urgent need for every type of health technology, including preventatives (PPE), diagnostic tests, devices (e.g. ventilators), therapies, and vaccines. The urgency and severity of this crisis has created a large global effort to find solutions as quickly as possible. As these technologies are produced, how can their efficacy, safety, cost, environment impacts, social impacts, and legal impacts be assessed reliably and ethically in the face of immediate crisis?

This webinar explored the international role of Health Technology Assessments in response to COVID-19, both immediately and in the months to come.

Date: May 22, 2020, 8:00 MDT (UTC -6)

View the webinar recording here

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Webinar Two: Evaluating Rapid Digitization in Hospital Settings

As global health systems have and continue to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a critical need for wide spread and rapid uptake of digital transformation within hospital and clinical practice settings. Thousands of clinicians around the world have swiftly migrated their clinical practices to provide telehealth consultations, set up and adopt the use of electronic medical records, overhaul record transfer processes, and completely adapt the way that patient outcome data is collected.

The questions we ask now: what worked well, and what did not? Were technologies adopted properly and how should hospitals go about assessing the adoption of technologies? Are there global consistencies and opportunities for shared learning and collaboration?

Driven by the HTAi Hospital-Based HTA Interest Group, the goal of this webinar is to dig in to this discussion on digital transformation using national examples, with a focus on:

•  Assessment of the value of digital transformation at hospital level
• Indication for quality measurement of digital transformation
• Measurement of the economic impact in hospital settings
• Evaluation techniques for adapting digital transformation at the hospital level, based on the needs caused by COVID-19: Examples from Danish setting
• Evaluate transferability to real practice, multidisciplinary evaluations
• Adoption process and impact of digital transformation

Date: June 5, 2020, 08:00 MDT (UTC -6)

View the webinar recording  here

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Webinar Three: Low Income and Lower Middle-Income Countries and Utilizing Evidence to Inform Decision Making

Experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic have varied among the global HTA community as has the place of evidence/HTA to inform decision-making in health system responses. In 2014, the WHO Resolution, WHA67.23, set out the value of HTA in support of universal health coverage especially to inform priority setting, selection, procurement and use of health technologies as well sustainable financing benefit packages. However, a lack of local data and capacity issues (including expertise and institutions) means few developing countries have formal HTA processes to support their pandemic response. What evidence was used and how important were organisational and community/patient aspects?

Understanding how developing countries have made decisions to respond to the demands of COVID-19 may identify useful lessons for other countries as well as opportunities for efficiencies and joint working. The experiences of developing countries also enable developed countries to reflect on their own experiences of HTA’s role in a pandemic from a different perspective.

The objective of this webinar is to understand what role evidence and HTA has played in developing countries in decisions about COVID-19 and what evidence or experiences have been most valuable for the represented countries in guiding decisions. What can other jurisdictions learn from this and what are the opportunities for shared learning, efficiencies and joint working going forwards?

Date: July 2, 2020; 07:00 MDT (UTC -6)

View the webinar recording here

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Webinar Four: Intensive Care = Expensive Care: How HTA can Support Cost-effective Digitization in Hospital Settings

Medical Devices have a significant impact on the healthcare system’s ability to treat patients both with and without COVID-19. With the critical need for increased capacity for Intensive Care Units, we more fully recognize that intensive care is expensive care.  The cost of medical devices and interventions in an ICU are one of the most costly areas of care provision. Increased need for Personal protective equipment, ventilators, and tests are critical to ensure that staff are safe and to prevent the spreading of the virus.  What role can HTA play in reducing these costs, through the enablement of remote consultations, and lower footfall in intensive care units?

The objectives of this webinar are to be forward looking, present a diverse stakeholder group and hear about how HTA, Intensive care doctors, medical device industry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have adapted and responded to COVID-19.  The webinar will further touch on problems with access and procurement and will investigate how international collaboration may affect a national healthcare system’s ability to respond. Looking to the future, the webinar will also discuss how HTAs of medical devices may help to reduce the patient footprint in hospitals and Intensive Care Units. It is vital now to ensure that outcomes can be maintained for non-Covid patients when large proportions of healthcare resources have been diverted to emergency care.

Date: July 16, 2020; 07:30 MDT (UTC -6)

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Webinar Five: Health Economics Methods in Rapid HTAs in Response to COVID-19

Many countries have responded to COVID-19 without having the right tools and information to properly assess the health economic impact of the imposed interventions due to lack of time and/or resources. This could have resulted in suboptimal health outcomes and/or higher costs. However, rapid decision making is required under these circumstances and compared to doing nothing, it can save lives and high related health costs and productivity losses due to death and sick days. To be able to assess different intervention strategies, the use of HTA tools, and solid and reliable data is required. Over the past months, multiple tools and datasets related to COVID-19 are made available which can be of great value when evidence-based policy decisions need to made.

The objective of this webinar is to show the usefulness of several tools and data sources and the potential impact on outcomes of policies to control COVID-19.

Date: Sept 21, 2020; 07:30 MDT (UTC -6)

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Webinar Six: COVID – 19 Modelling the Differences of Populations

This workshops session on COVID-19 modelling will go deeper into the modelling potentials and implications that have to deal with the differences between populations around the world. Compartmental models have been used a lot during the COVID-19 outbreak and have shown their usefulness during the COVID-19 outbreak. However there are also many countries that did not have suitable models that fitted their needs. Poor data, questionable assumptions and hard-to-understand and interpret models cause that countries are not taking full benefit of COVID-19 models for assessment purposes and potential support of pandemic control. Besides that, differences between countries have been playing an important role in the use of models. For example low and medium income countries (LMICs) have higher level of informal economies which make that quarantine measures have and had different health outcomes for those countries.

During the workshop, several exercises will be shown that can be relevant when modelling. Age differentiation, contact matrices, co-morbidity, economic informality level, costs among others will be discussed. Also the effectiveness of model outcomes on policy making and population behavior will be discussed as well as the limitations of political and economical systems on the implementations of certain modelled interventions.

The objective of the workshop is to make participants more aware of the potentials and difficulties of modelling COVID-19 across different populations in the world to improve future models.

Date: Oct 8, 2020; 06:00 MDT (UTC -6)

View the webinar recording here

 

The C-19 HTA Response webinar series provides a platform for discussion with member-driven content. The webinars are a mix of plenary-style presentations and open dialogue.

HTAi aims to consider each timezone, and all sessions will be recorded for subsequent viewing. Each webinar is approximately 90-minutes long.

 

Webinar Six: Modelling the differences of populations/Modelando las Diferencias de Poblaciones (Spanish Session)

SPANISH PRESENTATION/PRESENTACIÓN ESPAÑOLA

This workshops session on COVID-19 modelling will go deeper into the modelling potentials and implications that have to deal with the differences between populations around the world. Compartmental models have been used a lot during the COVID-19 outbreak and have shown their usefulness during the COVID-19 outbreak. However there are also many countries that did not have suitable models that fitted their needs. Poor data, questionable assumptions and hard-to-understand and interpret models cause that countries are not taking full benefit of COVID-19 models for assessment purposes and potential support of pandemic control. Besides that, differences between countries have been playing an important role in the use of models. For example low and medium income countries (LMICs) have higher level of informal economies which make that quarantine measures have and had different health outcomes for those countries.

During the workshop, several exercises will be shown that can be relevant when modelling. Age differentiation, contact matrices, co-morbidity, economic informality level, costs among others will be discussed. Also the effectiveness of model outcomes on policy making and population behavior will be discussed as well as the limitations of political and economical systems on the implementations of certain modelled interventions.

The objective of the workshop is to make participants more aware of the potentials and difficulties of modelling COVID-19 across different populations in the world to improve future models.

PANELISTS:

Arnold Hagens, MSc, Department of Health Sciences, University of Groningen (RUG), University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen (Netherlands)

Arnold is currently a PhD student in health- and pharmacoeconomics at University of Groningen in the Netherlands where he is working on economic health modelling to estimate the cost effectiveness of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Born in the Netherlands, he received his master’s degree in Economics and International Business Economics from Wageningen University and the Catholic University Leuven. He started his career as product marketing manager in the software industry in Bolivia after which he moved to health care research at South Group in Bolivia.

In the past years, he was a university lecturer and a health care researcher in Bolivia

Kathya Cordova-Pozo, Department of Health Sciences, University of Groningen (RUG), University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen (Netherlands)

Kathya Cordova-Pozo holds a PhD degree in international economics and politics from the university of Grenoble, France. For more than ten years, she has been involved in research projects in the field of reproductive health (SRH) and healthy lifestyles for children and adolescents with a special focus in Latin America. Her knowledge is strongly focused on research methods (both quantitative and qualitative), monitoring and evaluating health interventions to further suggest policy and decision-making. Currently, her research focus is in dynamic systems modelling COVID-19 for Latin America.

DATE

November 5, 2020

TIME

12:30 – 2:00 p.m. MDT (UTC -6)

View the webinar recording here