Health Technology Assessment Framework: Adaptation for Digital Health Technology Assessment
Digital health is the use of digital technologies to improve people's health and well-being, as well as the smarter use of clinical and genetic data for patient healthcare.
Digital technologies bring an opportunity to address the main challenges facing the Catalan healthcare system such as the ageing of the population, chronic diseases that require new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, inequality in the geographical distribution and delivery of health care services, and the emergence of innovative health technologies that increase national health expenditures.
The Agency for Quality and Assessment of Catalonia (AQuAS) has developed a specific Methodological framework to carry out a comprehensive digital health technology assessment (Digi-HTA) on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Health, and with the collaboration of the various agencies that make up the RedETS (Spanish Network of Agencies for Assessing National Health System Technologies and Performance),
This Guideline is developed specifically for the assessment of digital health technologies to be used for technologies that are mainly in the post-market authorization phase and focuses on:
- Describing the domains, dimensions and sub-dimensions to consider in the evaluation of digital health technologies, with special focus on the non-face-to-face care model, mobile health (mHealth) and artificial intelligence (AI).
- Defining the standards of evidence that must be achieved by digital health technologies according to the classification of risk deriving from their use.
Target users of the methodological Framework:
- Technical staff of HTA agencies
- Research staff and developers of digital health technologies
- Innovation centers
- Health professionals and health service providers
- Decision maker
- Regulatory bodies
*Note: at the moment of this post the document is just written in Spanish, with an abstract in English, but the translation of the whole guideline is expected in the coming weeks.