The single biggest cost-driver for the health care system is new health technolgies: new diagnostic and treatment tools including pharmaceuticals. Will these new technologies truly improve patient care? Are they cost-effective? How can we evaluate this? These are challenging questions for health care providers and managers.
Dr. Maurice McGregor (BIO) is president of the Technology Assessment Unit of the MUHC. He is a pioneer and a champion of health technology assessment (HTA) as a systematic approach to evaluating new technologies and reaching evidence-based conclusions about their use. The following four talks provide an overview of this still novel approach.
It was very Informative. A lot of information entered my mind after reading this article.Thanks.. by the way,anyone I am looking for feed backs and ideas about this maxgxl?
Very interesting–especially the results from the MUHC technology assessment unit. However, only a large teaching and research hospital really has the capacity to create a TAU. What is being done to share this information with smaller hospitals?
Dr. Maurice McGregor:
"Thank you for your comment. In 2002 and 2003 we e-mailed reports to every hospital in Quebec. We then opened a website on which every report is published in full , and informed them where the website was, www.mcgill.ca/tau/ This is quite busy. It received approximately 10,000 visits per month over the last year."
-mark goldman